Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy and a political-economic movement beginning in the 1970s -- and increasingly prominent since 1980 -- that de-emphasizes or rejects government intervention in the economy, focusing instead on achieving progress and even social justice by more free-market methods, especially an emphasis on economic growth, as measured by changes in real gross domestic product. Because of close association between this philosophy and neoclassical economics, and confusion with the overloaded term "liberal", some advocate the term "neoclassical philosophy". In some cases, where liberal parties collapsed or disappeared in the early 20th century, it is simply called "liberalism".

The term neoliberalism does not mean a version of new liberalism of John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, John Maynard Keynes, Franklin Roosevelt, or the Liberal Party of Britain. Rather, it focuses on the establishment of a stable medium of exchange, and the reduction of localized rules, regulations and barriers to commerce, and the privatization of state run enterprises. Classical liberal philosophy justified and encouraged the "first era of globalization" which came to an end with the shocks of the First World War, the collapse of the Gold Standard, and the Great Depression, just as neoliberalism is associated with the contemporary "second era of globalization," the seeds of which were planted after World War II. Neo-liberalism, since it focuses on international relationships, is pursued by socialist, liberal and conservative parties. Some portray neoliberalism as advocacy of "free markets from the top-down" since it has been imposed by international institutions, that is, the IMF, the European Union, or the World Bank, others identify it with corporatism, and the rise of multinational corporations.

Neo-liberalism's economic roots begin with the re-establishment of international monetary stability with the Bretton Woods Agreement, which fixed currencies to the US Dollar and the US Dollar to gold. However, as a specific movement it became increasingly prevalent based on the work of Robert Mundell and Arthur Flemming. At about the same time, the Mont Pelerin Society was formed by thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Michael Polanyi in response to totalitarian economic and social systems. Mont Pelerin spawned free market think tanks and advocacy groups in the UK and the US during the 1960s and 1970s which drew upon the theories of the Austrian School of economics and monetarism. Neo-liberalism argued that protectionism produced economic inefficiencies, and that developing nations should open their markets to the outside, and focus on exporting. This meant the liquidation of state owned corporations and enterprises, and the reduction in rules designed to hinder trade, as well as lowering tariff barriers. Neo-liberal ideas found expression in a series of trade talks to form the World Trade Organization as well as regional free trade agreements such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The slow and quantitative development of neoliberalism after World War II became more rapid in the 1970s, and not always by peaceful means. One of the often touted neo-liberalism success stories is General Augusto Pinochet's Chile - which began with a CIA backed coup, violently ousting the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. The Allende government had pursued radical social-democratic policies and has sometimes been labeled "Marxist", and had been opposed by conservative elements in the US since the early 1960s. "Free market" policies, including privatization of state assets, were imposed by "los Chicago Boys," Chicago school economists inspired by Milton Friedman. These policies were later imitated by the Bretton Woods institutions operating in many other poor countries, particularly in Latin America.

The rise of neoliberalism culminated with the Reagan government in the United States and that of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, along with the fall of the Soviet Union and the fading of social democracy and new liberalism as alternatives to unbridled capitalism. These governments not only shifted their own countries' policies toward laissez-faire but used their control of the major Bretton Woods institutions to impose their policies on the rest of the world. So nowadays, neoliberalism is generally seen as synonymous with the "Washington Consensus," the dominant policy view at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. A major axiom of the neoliberal school is that (to quote Thatcher) "There Is No Alternative" to unbridled capitalism. This slogan is often abbreviated as "TINA".

In the late 1980s and early 1990s neo-liberal policies swung back towards the left, as Bill Clinton of the United States backed the North American Free Trade Agreement and America's entry into the WTO. Free trade was seen as essential to Rubinomics, which promoted the creation of equity and technology as the means by which America would be able to manage a persistent balance of trade deficit. Left leaning, neo-liberal economists such as Joseph Stiglitz pointed out that protectionism is not a left or right issue, but an issue of asymmetry, and therefore a general cause for concern.

Critics of neo-liberalism in both theory and practice are numerous, particularly in developing nations whose assets have been sold off to foreigners, and their domestic political and economic institutions destroyed by the effects of being exposed to trade. Within the neo-liberal movement there is intense criticism of how many developed nations have demanded that others liberalize their markets for manufactured goods, while protecting their own domestic agricultural markets.

Anti-globalization advocates are the most vociferous opponents of neo-liberalism, particular its implementation as "free capital flows" but not free labor flows. They argue that neo-liberalism represents a "race to the bottom" as capital flows to the lowest environmental and labor standards, and is merely updated "beggar they neighbor" imperialism, dating back 200 years. In this they are in fundamental agreement with many of neo-liberalism's supporters who argue that neo-liberalism represents classical liberalism.

Some conservative economists argue that neo-liberal policies create institutions which remove "moral hazard", as governments must bail out financial crisis after financial crisis, because developing nations are "too big to fail". They point to the string of currency meltdowns in the 1990s - Mexico, Russia, Eastern Europe, East Asia and Argentina - as proof that there is a danger to allowing profit without sufficient penalty.


Contents [hide]
1 Theory
2 Practice

1 Neoliberal theory
2 External Critical Resources

Theory

As described by UC-Berkeley economic historian and defender of neoliberalism Professor Bradford DeLong (http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/), this "ism" has two main tenets:

"The first is that close economic contact between the industrial core [of the capitalist world economy] and the developing periphery is the best way to accelerate the transfer of technology which is the sine qua non for making poor economies rich (hence all barriers to international trade should be eliminated as fast as possible). The second is that governments in general lack the capacity to run large industrial and commercial enterprises. Hence, [except] for core missions of income distribution, public-good infrastructure, administration of justice, and a few others, governments should shrink and privatize)."

To critics of neo-liberalism, these two principles represent parts of the " trickle-down theory," i.e., that under free-market capitalism, economic growth and technological change benefit even the poorest countries and people, even if that process is dominated by multinational corporations, rich domestic elites, and organizations such as the IMF dominated by rich countries' financiers. To defenders, such as Amartya Sen, "Development is Freedom". More economic growth, more specialization and more opportunity create chances for individuals to achieve than more rigid structures which provide only illusory protection.

The concept of neoliberalism became popular among economists not only as the balance of political power changed (as discussed above), but as many decided that post-World War II national development strategies for poor countries were not having the intended effects. In particular, funding for mega-projects left poor countries with high debts but little growth to show for it. It is also a reaction to the perceived failures populist and modern liberal economic policies, such as import-substituting industrialization. Failures of the East-Asian ( Taiwanese, South Korean) policies of state-guided export-led economic growth and of the centrally-planned or "communist" economies also were interpreted as requiring neoliberal medicine. The export-led economies were criticized as involving "crony capitalism," while most of the centrally-planned countries fell apart economically and politically in late 1980s and early 1990s.

As noted, the neoliberal doctrine is linked to the so-called "Washington consensus," a set of specific policy goals designed for Latin American countries. In addition to the tenets of neoliberalism noted by Professor deLong, the Washington consensus stipulated that a country should have stable exchange rates and a government budget in balance.

Practice

The practice of neo-liberal ideas varies widely. Some proponents see transperancy, development and uniformity as the most important goals, while many others see the dismantling of state regulations, as such, as the primary purpose. Many leading implementors of neo-liberal policies criticize the manner in which those policies are implemented. Some blame the institutions such as the World Bank and IMF directly, while others argue that by the time the IMF and World Bank are involved, the problems have already become endemic - they blame the "shock therapy" approach which was taken in the 1980s for much of the economic damage, and argue that "big bang" marketization, such as was pursued in Russia, leads to centralized corrupt economic oligarchy, the very opposite of what neo-liberalism intends.

In practice, neoliberalism differed from much of pure free-market policy in that it emphasized the imposition of intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, and trademarks), encouraging monopoly rather than free market competition. Often, neoliberal reforms put blue-collar workers in rich countries in competition with those in poor countries, but privileged professionals such as medical doctors are protected from such competition.

There were also catastrophic failures. In particular, Nobel prize winner and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that the IMF is guilty of forcing neoliberal and Washington consensus policy goals on countries at times when it was not appropriate (i.e., the Asian Economic Crisis), with devastating results. The "cookie cutter" approach of applying the same policy no matter what the specificities were can be seen in this crisis, as the I.M.F. pushed for government budget cuts even though government budget deficits had nothing to do with the crisis. Neoliberalism has also been criticised by populists, social democrats, and anti-capitalists, who argue that unbridled market forces inevitably increase inequality in wealth and hence power.

In a recent book, Professor Robert Pollin (http://www.bookfinder.us/review5/1859846734.html) summarizes the neoliberal record. Excluding the People's Republic of China, which did not follow the neoliberal lead, the era of the "developmental state" (1961-80) saw a per capita growth rate of real gross domestic product that averaged 3.2 percent per year. On the other hand, during the neoliberal era (1981-99) this growth rate fell to 0.7 percent per year, slowing both absolutely and relative to the wealthier countries of the OECD. China, which shifted from pure state planning to state-guided export promotion, saw its per capita growth rate rise from 2.5 to 8.4 percent between these periods. (See Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent, p. 131. ISBN 1-85984-673-4) Thus, according to the neoliberals' own standards, their policies can be seen as a failure. Pollin also shows the rapid increase in income inequality between these periods, especially when China is excluded from the sample. The increase in economic inequality is one major hallmark of neoliberalism.

It is an open question as to whether the western world continues to be dominated by neoliberal policies. Whilst the European Union and many individual countries have policies which support workers' rights, some scholars argue that these are adaptations of the core neoliberal economic model rather than a fundamental move away from it.

This short entry cannot end the debate. One question is whether it is better to define neoliberalism in terms of its self-image (as Professor deLong does) or in terms of its actual practice. Either way, these critiques do not automatically indicate that neoliberalism should be dumped. It is possible, as the more militant advocates of laissez faire say, that neoliberal policies were not applied in a pure enough form. Alternatively, one might argue that if neoliberalism had not been pursued, economic events would have been even worse. Further, it is possible that neoliberalism could be reformed.

Neoliberal theory

While some use the terms neoliberal and libertarian or classical liberalism interchangeably there is a difference between the two philosophies. While both share a belief in market economics and free trade, neoliberal economics theory shares with neoliberal international relations theory (and liberal internationalism) a belief in international regimes and a degree of global governance as a means of negotiating and administering international agreements. Neoliberals believe that greater economic and political interdependence will lead to progress and a reduction of international tensions or at least divert states from utilizing military means to resolve conflict. Libertarians reject the neoliberal belief that global governance bodies or state negotiated treaty regimes that bind the individual are desirable.

Neoliberalism accepts macro-economic theory that assumes full employment and rational expectations, that is, it is a modern neo-classical and free market economic theory, which holds that monetary policy is capable of making Say's Law apply in practice, even if it does not apply in theory. The central question is the cost burden imposed by regulations in the Mundell-Fleming Model. In the Mundell-Fleming Model of open exchange trade, nations may have policy autonomy -- that is regulation of internal markets -- monetary policy freedom and fiscal freedom only as trade-offs. That is, having monetary policy freedom reduces the ability to regulate the economy. The central argument is then how effective each of these mechanisms are for producing economic growth. It is generally recognized that monetary policy is better than fiscal policy which is better than regulation, but how much, and under what conditions is a matter of intense debate. During the peak popularity of the monetarist school, it was asserted that monetary policy was so much better than the other mechanisms, that it was therefore worthwhile to sacrifice, or drastically reduce, the other two components of government action, in return for greater effectiveness of monetary policy.

With the 1990s and the productivity surge, and the events where the correlation between money demand and money supply weakened, this assertion was called into question, serving as the theoretical basis for "The Third Way" and a neo-liberal economics which was not so explicitly associated with conservative policies.

Neo-Liberalism's theoretical basis, however, has been called into question with the failure of its implementation, however imperfectly, to produce the expected result of capital flowing from the industrialized core nations and out to the peripheral nations. This failure, noted by Stiglitz, Delong and Krugman, is not explained easily in theory. Instead, capital has pooled in the industrial core, as seen by the increasing investment deficit of the United States.

Prominent exponents of neo-liberal policies include former US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as economists such as Robert Solow, Gregory Mankiw, and Robert Mundell.

See also: anti-capitalism, privatization, Keynesian economics, globalisation, Neoconservatism, Friedrich Hayek

External Critical Resources

Norman Fairclough

Norman Fairclough is reader in Linguistics at the Lancaster University. He ist one of the founders of Critical Discourse Analysis, a branch of Linguistics that looks at the influence of power relations on the content and structure of texts. He is interested in how discursive practices are socially shaped and the social effects of discursive practices. 'Language and Power' explored the imbrications between language and social institutional practices and of "wider" political and social structures. Fairclough is influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser.

publications

  • Language and Power (London 1989)
  • Critical discourse analysis (London 1995) ISBN 0-582-21980-9.

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre-Félix Bourdieu (August 1, 1930-January 23, 2002) was a French sociologist. In its obituary, The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom said he "was, for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France... a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan". His book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, was named as one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. Although he has a formidable reputation amongst sociologists in the English-speaking world, he is much less well-known amongst the general Anglophone intelligentsia than Foucault or Jacques Derrida, both of whom Bourdieu castigated in Homo Academicus as Parisian mandarins, distant from the real world, secure in their privileges.

In France, Bourdieu was not seen as an ivory tower academic or cloistered don, but as a passionate activist for those he believed subordinated by society. Again, from The Guardian: "[In 2003] a documentary film about Pierre Bourdieu - Sociology is a Combat Sport - became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do." Perhaps the nearest equivalent in the English-speaking world would be Noam Chomsky.

He was born in Denguin (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). From 1962 to 1983 he was married to Marie-Claire Brizard.

Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu studied philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. He worked as a teacher. Afterwards (1958-1960) he did research in Algeria, laying the groundwork for his sociological reputation. Since 1981, Bourdieu held a chair at the Collège de France. In 1993 he was honored with the "Médaille d'or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS).

His work was empirical, grounded in the everyday life and can be seen as cultural sociology or as a theory of practice.

Bourdieu was both completely empirical and a master theorist, a rare if not unique combination in sociology. His key terms were habitus and field. He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, and cultural capital. For Bourdieu the position an individual is located at in the social space is defined not by class, but by the amount of capital across all kinds of capital, and by the relative amounts social, economic and cultural capital account for.

He was also known as a politically interested and active leftist intellectual, supporting work against the influences of political elites and neoliberal capitalism. He was the left's enemy of itself: the French Socialist party used to talk of la gauche bourdieusienne, their enemies on the left. It is difficult to think of an Anglo equivalent: perhaps a sober Christopher Hitchens.

Some examples of his empirical results include:

  • showing that despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts in France, people's artistic preferences (e.g. classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly correlate with the position in the social space
  • showing that subtleties of language such as accent, grammar, spelling and style -- all part of cultural capital -- are a major factor in social mobility (e.g. getting a higher paid, higher status job).

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, reproduce themselves even under the pretense that society fosters social mobility.

Bourdieu was extraordinarily prolific, author of hundreds of articles and many books, only some few dozens of which are available in English. His style is dense in English translation: and even more unexpected for those prepared for the sociological jargon but not for the literary effects that strike the English-speaker as mannered and unnecessary.

To summarise Bourdieu's theoretical and political stance and complexities: he would have applauded Wikipedia as empowering the average person in an attempt to recapture the definition of knowledge from the ruling classes, but he would have derided its neutral point of view policy as a fantasy of Anglo-American faux-liberals, who-- by claiming a meta-stance above the rest of us-- merely foist on us their own definition of power and reality.

Bourdieu's work

External links

Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalist industrial society and of democracy and the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary (especially German) politics.

Habermas has integrated into a comprehensive framework of social theory and philosophy the German philosophical thought of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Dilthey, Husserl, and Gadamer, the Marxian tradition - both the theory of Marx himself as well as the critical neo-Marxian theory of the Frankfurt School, i.e. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse -, the sociological theories of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead, the linguistic philosophy and speech act theories of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle, the American pragmatist tradition of Peirce and Dewey, and the sociological systems theory of Parsons.

Habermas considers his own major achievement the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of either the cosmos or the knowing subject. He carries forward the tradition of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for rationality.

Habermas burst onto the German intellectual scene in the 1950s with an influential critique of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He studied philosophy and sociology under the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, but because of a rift over him between the two took his Habilitation, in political science, at the University of Marburg under Wolfgang Abendroth. Very unusally for the German academic scene at that time, he was called to an extraordinary professorship of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith), which he held until moving back to Frankfurt to a full Chair.

He accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (near Munich) in 1971, and worked there until 1983, two years after the publication of his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas then returned to his chair at Frankfurt and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring from Frankfurt in 1993, Habermas has continued to publish extensively.

Jürgen Habermas's main aim has been to construct a social theory that is also a non-oppressive and inclusive universalist moral framework. The framework rests on the argument that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the greek word for "purpose" or "goal") - the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding. Habermas built the framework out of the speech-act philosophy of Austin and Searle, the theories of moral development of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of his Heidelberg colleague Karl-Otto Apel.

Within sociology, Habermas's major contribution is the development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution and modernization focusing on the difference between communicative rationality and rationalization on the one hand and strategic/instrumental rationality and rationalization on the other. This includes a critique from a communicative standpoint of the differentiation-based theory of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a student of Parsons.

His defence of modern society and civil society has been a source of inspiration to others, and is considered a major philosophical alternative to the varieties of poststructuralism. He has also offered an influential analysis of late capitalism.

Habermas sees the rationalization, humanization, and democratization of society in terms of the institutionalization of the rationality potential that is inherent in the communicative competence that is specific to the human species, has developed through the course of evolution, but in contemporary society is suppressed or weakened by the way in which major domains of social life, such as the market, the state, and organizations, have been given over to or taken over by strategic/instrumental rationality, so that the logic of the system supplants that of the lifeworld.

Habermas is famous as a teacher and mentor. Among his most prominent students have been the political sociologist Claus Offe (professor at Humboldt University in Berlin), the sociological theorist Hans Joas (professor at the Free University of Berlin and at the University of Chicago), the theorist of societal evolution Klaus Eder, the social philosopher Axel Honneth (the current director of the Institute for Social Research), and the American philosopher Thomas McCarthy.

Habermas is famous as a public intellectual as well as a scholar; most notably, in the 1980s he used the popular press to attack historians (i.e., Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber) who had tried to demarcate Nazi rule and the Holocaust from the mainstream of German history, explain Nazism as an reaction to Bolshevism, and partially rehabilitate the German armed forces. (The so-called "Historikerstreit," or "Historians' Quarrel" was not at all one-sided, because Habermas was himself attacked by eminent scholars like Joachim Fest.) More recently, Habermas has been outspoken in his opposition to the Coalition invasion of Iraq. He is perhaps most famous outside of Germany for his conceptualization of the public sphere.

Habermas visited China in April 2001 and received a big welcome. He gave numerous speeches under titles such as "Nation-states under the Pressure of Globalisation".

Major works

  • The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
  • On the Logic of the Social Sciences
  • Knowledge and Human Interests
  • Theory and Practice
  • Towards a Rational Society
  • Legitimation Crisis
  • Communication and the Evolution of Society
  • The Theory of Communicative Action Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorie_des_kommunikativen_Handelns)
  • Philosophical-Political Profiles
  • The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
  • The New Conservatism
  • Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action
  • Postmetaphysical Thinking
  • Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy
  • On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction
  • The Inclusion of the Other
  • The Postnational Constellation

The best interpretation in English of Habermas's work, especially his earlier work is still Thomas McCarthy's The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (MIT Press, 1978), which was written just as Habermas was developing his full-fledged communication theory. An especially clear account of Habermas's key views in philosophy, is provided by Raymond Geuss's The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1981). For a very short, good, more recent introduction focusing on Habermas's communication theory of society, see Jane Braaten's Habermas's Critical Theory of Society (State University of New York Press, 1991.)

External links

Speech act


A speech act is an action performed by means of language, such as describing something ("It is snowing."), asking a question ("Is it snowing?"), making a request or order ("Could you pass the salt?", "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot you!"), or making a promise ("I promise I'll give it back.")

For much of the history of linguistics and the philosophy of language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored. The work of J. L. Austin led philosophers to pay more attention to the way in which language is used in everyday activities. His student John Searle further developed this approach. However, the first systematic and comprehensive work on speech acts had already been done long before by the phenomenologist Adolf Reinach in 1913.

Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An interesting type of illocutionary speech acts are performatives, which are expressions such as "I nominate John to be President.", "I sentence you to ten years imprisonment." or "I promise to pay you back.". In these expressions, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the sentence itself; the speech is the act it effects. In contrast perlocutionary speech acts cause actions that are not the same as the speech.

The study of speech acts forms part of the discipline of pragmatics, which forms part of linguistics.

See also

External links


Understanding

Understanding is a psychological state in relation to an object or person whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to be able to deal adequately with that object.

For example, I understand the weather if I am able to predict and give an explanation of some of its features.

Or, a psychiatrist understands another person if he knows his anxieties and their causes, and can give him useful advice on how to minimise the anxiety.

I understand a command if I know who gave it, what is expected, and whether the command is legitimate.

Also one can understand a reasoning, an argument, and a language.

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 - September 16, 1980), a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1954, was a francophone Swiss developmental psychologist who is most well known for organizing cognitive development into a series of stages.

Piaget's theory supposes that people develop schemas (conceptual models) by either assimilating or accommodating new information. These concepts can be explained as fitting information in to existing schemas, and altering existing schemas in order to accommodate new information, respectively.

Although some of Piaget's ideas are similar to those of Lev Vygotsky, Piaget was apparently unaware of Vygotsky's work. Originally a marine biologist, with a specialization in the molluscs of Lake Geneva, he embarked on his studies of developmental biology when he observed the way his infant daughters came to grips with and then mastered the world around them.

Piaget's theories of psychological development have proved influential. Among others, the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has incorporated them into his work, most notably in The Theory of Communicative Action.

Piaget also had a considerable impact in the field of computer science. Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo programming language. Alan Kay used Piaget's theories as the basis for the Dynabook programming system concept, which was first discussed within the confines of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC. These discussions led to the development of the Alto prototype, which explored for the first time all the elements of the GUI, or Graphical User Interface, and influenced the creation of user interfaces in the 1980's and beyond.

Major works and Achievements

  • The Child's Conception of the World (1926)
  • The Origin of Intelligence in Children (1936)
  • The Early Growth of Logic in the Child (1958).

PIAGET POSTCARD A "Piaget Postcard" written by Leslie Smith is available on:

http://www.piaget.org/aboutPiaget.html

with a fuller summary of Piaget's work and achievements. Anyone who - like Oliver Twist - still wants more is welcome to read:

Smith, L. (1997). Jean Piaget. In N. Sheehy, A. Chapman. W.Conroy (eds). Biographical dictionary of psychology. London: Routledge. Smith, L. (2001). Jean Piaget. In J. A. Palmer (ed) 50 Modern thinkers on education: from Piaget to the present. London: Routledge

External Links


Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg (October 25, 1927 - April 15, 1987) was a psychologist who was born in Bronxville, New York. He served as a professor at Harvard University. He started as a developmental psychologist in the early 1970s and became famous for his later work in moral education and moral reasoning. Kohlberg's theory of moral development emphasizes that moral reasoning develops in stages. This idea is similar to Jean Piaget's theories of logical reasoning.

Kohlberg's moral discussion approach

Like Piaget, Kohlberg believed that development is fueled by social interaction. Moral education can be accomplished in formal education by confronting people with moral dilemmas that evoke cognitive conflicts. According to Kohlberg, discussion of these dilemmas promotes development to higher stages of moral reasoning by showing the benefits of the higher stages of reasoning. He and others formulated dilemmas for this purpose. After having been critizised for tending merely to the promotion of moral reasoning, but not of moral actions, Kohlberg developed the approach of "Just-Community-Schools".

Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Kohlberg proposed that moral reasoning, which he thought to be the basis for ethical behavior, develops through stages. From the results of his studies at Harvard's Center for Moral Education, he concluded that there are six identifiable stages of moral development. This theory is known as Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Kohlberg's stages of moral development were developed by Lawrence Kohlberg to explain the development of moral reasoning. This theory holds that moral reasoning, which Kohlberg thought to be the basis for ethical behavior, has developmental stages. From the results of his studies at Harvard's Center for Moral Education, Kohlberg concluded that there are six identifiable stages of moral development. These stages can be classified into three levels. Note that these stages are known by various names.

Contents [hide]
1 Stages
2 An explanation of the stages
3 Examples
4 Theoretical assumptions
5 Criticism

Stages

Level 1 (Pre-conventional)

1. Obedience and punishment orientation
2. Self-interest orientation

Level 2 (Conventional)

3. Interpersonal accord and conformity (The good boy/good girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation (Law and order morality)

Level 3 (Post-conventional)

5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles (Principled conscience)

An explanation of the stages

The pre-conventional level of moral reasoning is especially common in children, although adults can also exhibit this level of reasoning. Reasoners in the pre-conventional level judge the morality of an action by its direct consequences. The pre-conventional level is divided into two stages: stage one (obedience and punishment orientation) and stage two (self-interest orientation). In stage one, individuals focus on the direct consequences that their actions will have for themselves. For example, they think that an action is morally wrong if the person who commits it gets punished. Stage two espouses the what's in it for me position; right behavior being defined by what is in one's own best interest. Stage two reasoning shows a limited interest in the needs of others, but only to a point where it might furthers one's own interests, such as "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." Concern for others is not based on loyalty or intrinsic respect in stage two.

The conventional level of moral reasoning is typical of adults and older children. Persons who reason in a conventional way judge the morality of actions by comparing these actions to social rules and expectations. The conventional level is divided into two stages: stage three (conformity orientation) and stage four (law-and-order morality). Individuals whose moral reasoning is in stage three seek approval from other people. They try to be a good boy or good girl having learned that there is inherent value in doing so. Stage three reasoning may judge the morality of an action by evaluating its consequences in terms of a person's relationships. In stage four, individuals think it is important to obey the laws and social conventions because of its importance to maintaining society. Moral reasoning in stage four is thus beyond the need for approval exhibited in stage three.

The post-conventional level is divided into two stages: stage five (social contract orientation) and stage six (principled conscience). Persons in stage five have certain principles to which they may attach more value than laws, such as human rights or social justice. In this reasoning, actions are wrong if they violate these ethical principles. Laws are regarded as social contracts rather than dictums, and must be changed when necessary (provided there is agreement). By this reasoning laws that do not promote general social welfare, for example, should be changed. (Democratic governments are ostensibly based on stage five reasoning.) In stage six, the final stage, moral reasoning is based on the use of abstract reasoning using universal ethical principles. While Kohlberg insisted that stage six exists, he had difficulty finding participants who use it. It appears that people rarely if ever reach stage six of Kohlberg's model.

Kohlberg also observed that there is a stage 4½ or 4+ which is a transition from stage four to stage five. This stage is where people have become disaffected with the arbitrary nature of law and order reasoning and become moral relativists. This transition stage may result in either progress to stage five or in regression to stage four.

Kohlberg further speculated that a seventh stage may exist (Transcendental Morality) which would link religion with moral reasoning (See James Fowler's stages of faith).

Examples

Kohlberg used moral dilemmas to determine which stage of moral reasoning a person uses. The dilemmas are short stories in which a person has to make a moral decision. The participant is asked what this person should do. A dilemma that Kohlberg used in his original research was the druggist's dilemma:

A woman was near death from a unique kind of cancer. There is a drug that might save her. The drug costs $4,000 per dosage. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money and tried every legal means, but he could only get together about $2,000. He asked the doctor scientist who discovered the drug for a discount or let him pay later. But the doctor scientist refused.
Should Heinz break into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

From a theoretical point of view, it is not important what the participant thinks that Heinz should do. The point of interest is the justification that the participant offers. Below are examples of possible arguments that belong to the six stages. It is important to keep in mind that these arguments are only examples. It it possible that a participant reaches a completely different conclusion using the same stage of reasoning:

  • Stage one (obedience): Heinz should not steal the medicine, because otherwise he will be put in prison.
  • Stage two (self-interest): Heinz should steal the medicine, because he will be much happier if he saves his wife, even if he will have to serve a prison sentence.
  • Stage three (conformity): Heinz should steal the medicine, because his wife expects it.
  • Stage four (law-and-order): Heinz should not steal the medicine, because the law prohibits stealing.
  • Stage five (human rights): Heinz should steal the medicine, because everyone has a right to live, regardless of the law. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine, because the scientist has a right to fair compensation.
  • Stage six (universal human ethics): Heinz should steal the medicine, because saving a human life is a more fundamental value than the property rights of another person. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine, because that violates the golden rule of honesty and respect.
  • Stage seven (transcendental morality): Heinz should not steal the medicine, because he and his wife should accept the sickness as part of the natural cycle of life-and-death and instead enjoy their time left together.

Theoretical assumptions

The stages of Kohlberg's model refer to reasoning, not to actions or to people themselves. Kohlberg insists that the form of moral arguments is independent of the content of the arguments. According to Kohlberg, moral reasoning is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for moral action. Additionally, Piaget's stages of cognitive development are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the development of moral reasoning. It is important to remember that he posits justice as the a priori summum bonum (justice is assumed to be equal with moral virtue).

According to Kohlberg, a person who progresses to a higher stage of moral reasoning cannot skip stages. For example, a person cannot jump from being concerned mostly with peer opinions (stage three) to being a proponent of social contracts (stage five). However, when persons encounter a moral dilemma and find their current level of moral reasoning unsatisfactory, they will look to the next level. Discovery of the limitations of the current stage of thinking promotes moral development.

Criticism

One criticism of Kohlberg's theory is that it emphasizes justice to the exclusion of other values. As a consequence of this, it may not adequately address the arguments of people who value other moral aspects of actions. For example, Carol Gilligan has argued that Kohlberg's theory is overly male-centric. His theory was the result of empirical research using only male particants. Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's theory therefore did not adequately describe the concerns of women. She developed an alternative theory of moral reasoning that is based on the value of care. Although recent research has generally not found any gender differences in moral development, Gilligan's theory illustrates that theories on moral development do not need to focus on the value of justice.

Other psychologists have challenged the assumption that moral action is primarily reached by formal reasoning. For example, social intuitionists assume that people often make moral judgments without weighing concerns such as fairness, law, human rights and abstract ethical values. If this is true, the arguments that Kohlberg and other rationalist psychologists have analyzed are often no more than post-hoc rationalizations of intuitive decisions. This would mean that moral reasoning is less relevant to moral action than it seems.


Modernity

Modernity is a relativist term given to a type, mode, or stage of society as being more developed than another. In current contexts, "modernity" may describe the positive aspects of advanced technology, or else is often a characterization of the Western system of international capitalism as an entity for benevolent progress and development.

The use of the term "modernism" was initially confined to the context recent history of West European countries from the Renaissance to the rise of mass media, and characterized by a larger-scale integration of formerly isolated local communities and departure from tradition and religion toward individualism, rational or scientific organization of society, and egalitarianism. A society in the state of modernity is called a modern society. The process of a society becoming a modern society is called modernization. The most defining events in the modern period include:

The more particular events in the Western European history include:

It is usually suggested that some or most of these events led to the more complete realization of "modern" society in Europe.

Contents [hide]
1 Defining Characteristics of Modernity
2 Modernity as hope, modernity as doom
3 Modernity and the contemporary society
4 See also

Defining Characteristics of Modernity

There have been numerous attempts, particularly in the field of sociology, to understand what modernity is. A wide variety of terms are used to describe the society, social life, driving force, symptomatic mentality, or some other defining aspects of modernity. They include: Bureaucracy, Disenchantment of the world, Rationalization, Secularization, Alienation, Commodification, Decontexutalization, Individualism, Subjectivism, Linear-progression, Objectivism, Universalism, Reductionism, Chaos, Mass society, Industrial society, Homogenization, Unification, Hybridization, Diversification, Democratization, Centralization, Hierarchical organization, Mechanization, Totalitarian, and so on.

Modernity is often characterized by comparing modern societies to premodern or postmodern ones, and the understanding of those non-modern social statuses is, again, far from a settled issue. To an extent, it is reasonable to doubt the very possibility of a descriptive concept that can adequately capture diverse realities of societies of various historical contexts, especially non-European ones, let alone a three-stage model of social evolution from premodernity to postmodernity.

However, in terms of social structure, many of the defining events and characteristics listed above stem from a transition from relatively isolated local communities to a more integrated large-scale society. Understood this way, modernization might be a general, abstract process which can be found in many different parts of histories, rather than a unique event in Europe.

In general, large-scale integration involves:

  • Increased movement of goods, capital, people, and information among formerly separate areas, and increased influence that reaches beyond a local area.
  • Increased formalization of those mobile elements, development of 'circuits' on which those elements and influences travel, and standardization of many aspects of the society in general that is conducive to the mobility.
  • Increased specialization of different segments of society, such as the division of labor, and interdependency among areas.

Seemingly contradictory characteristics ascribed to modernity are often different aspects of this process. For example, unique local culture is invaded and lost by the increased mobility of cultural elements, such as recipes, folktales, and hit songs, resulting in a cultural homogenization across localities, but the repertoire of available recipes and songs increases within a area because of the increased interlocal movement, resulting in a diversification within each locality. (This is manifest especially in large metropolises where there are many mobile elements). Centralized bureaucracy and hierarchical organization of governments and firms grows in scale and power in an unprecedented manner, leading some to lament the stifling, cold, rationalist or totalitarian nature of modern society. Yet individuals, often as replaceable components, may be able to move in those social subsystems, creating a sense of liberty, dynamic competition and individualism for others. This is especially the case when a modern society is compared with premodern societies, in which the family and social class one is born into shapes one's lifecourse to a greater extent.

These social changes are somewhat common to many different levels of social integration, and not limited to what happened to the West European societies in a specific time period. For example, these changes might happen when formerly separate virtual communities merge. Similarly, when two human beings develop a close relationship, communication, convention, and increased division of roles tend to emerge. Another example can be found in ongoing globalization - the increased international flows changing the landscape for many. In other words, while modernity has been characterized in many seemingly contradictory ways, many of those characterizations can be reduced to a relatively simple set of concepts of social change.

At the same time, however, such an understanding of modernity is certainly not satisfactory to many, because it fails to explain the global influence of West European and American societies since the Renaissance. Mere large-scale integration of local communities, seen in the Macedonia of Alexander the Great or the Mongolia of the Khans, would not necessarily result in the same magnitude of influence as the West European modernization. What has made Western Europe so special?

There have been two major answers to this question. First, an internal factor is that only in Europe, through the Renaissance humanists and early modern philosophers and scientists, rational thinking came to replace many intellectual activities that had been under heavy influence of convention, superstition, and religion. This line of answer is most frequently associated with Max Weber, a sociologist who is known to have pursued the answer to the above question.

Second, an external factor is that colonization, starting as early as the Age of Discovery, created exploitative relations between European countries and their colonies. This view has notably been explored by the world systems theory of Emanuel Wallerstein.

It is also notable that such commonly-observed features of many modern societies as the nuclear family, slavery, gender roles, and nation states do not necessarily fit well with the idea of rational social organization in which components such as people are treated equally. While many of these features have been dissolving, histories seem to suggest those features may not be mere exceptions to the essential characteristics of modernization, but necessary parts of it.

Modernity as hope, modernity as doom

Modernization brought a series of seemingly undisputable benefits to people. Lower infant mortality rate, decreased death from starvation, eradication of some of the fatal diseases, more equal treatment of people with different backgrounds and incomes, and so on. To some, this is an indication of the potential of modernity, perhaps yet to be fully realized. In general, rational, scientific approach to problems and the pursuit of economic wealth seems still to many a reasonable way of understanding good social development.

At the same time, there are a number of dark sides of modernity pointed out by sociologists and others.

Technological development occurred not only in the medical and agricultural fields, but also in the military. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, and the following nuclear arms race in the post-war era, are considered by some as symbols of the danger of technologies that humans may or may not be able to handle wisely.

Stalin's Great Purges and the Holocaust (or Shoah) are considered by some as indications that rational thinking and rational organization of a society might involve exclusion, or extermination, of non-standard elements. It is pointed out by some that homosexuals, criminals, and the mentally ill are also among the excluded in the modern society.

Environmental problems comprise another category in the dark side of modernity. Pollution is perhaps the least controversial of these, but one may include decreasing biodiversity and climate change as results of development. The development of biotechnology and genetic engineering are creating what some consider sources of unknown risks.

Besides these obvious incidents, many critics point out psychological and moral hazards of modern life - alienation, feeling of rootlessness, loss of strong bonds and common values, hedonism, and so on. This is often accompanied by a re-evaluation of pre-modern communities, though such criticism may slip into a nostalgia for an idealized past.

Modernity and the contemporary society

There is an ongoing debate about the relationship between modernity and present societies. The debate has two dimensions. First, there is an empirical question of whether some of the present societies can be understood as a variation of modernity (such as hypermodernity) or as a distinctive type, such as postmodernity. Second, there is a judgement of whether modernization has been, and is, desirable for a society. Seemingly new phenomena such as globalization, the end of the Cold War, ethnic conflicts, and the proliferation of information technologies are taken by some as reasons to adopt a new vision to navigate social development.

Post-structuralism

(Redirected from Poststructuralism)

Post-structuralism is a body of work that followed in the wake of structuralism, and sought to understand a world irrevocably dissected into parts of systems, as in deconstruction.

Post-structuralists are most clearly distinct from their structuralist predecessors in their rejection of structuralism's reductivist methodology. They challenge the structuralist claim to be a critical metalanguage by which all text can be translated, arguing that a neutral omniscent view outside the realm of text is impossible. Instead, they pursue an infinite play of signifiers and do not attempt to impose, or privilege, one reading of them over another. Appropriately, within the discipline of post-structuralism there are few theories in agreement, but all take as their starting point a critique of structuralism. Post-structuralist investigations tend to be politically oriented, as many of them believe the world we think we inhabit is merely a social construct with different ideologies pushing for hegemony.

Key post-structuralists are the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the historian Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes (at least the later works) and, arguably, Jean Baudrillard.

See also

postmodernism -- structuralism -- recursionism

Recursionism

Recursionism means a variety of things to different people. In recent years, the popularity of fractals has brought certain recursionist notions into the popular discourse. Fractal patterns are also found in physical structures and in economics and engineering.

Recursionism in art

It is the use of repeating patterns in modern art (as in the works of M.C. Escher and Salvador Dalí, as also self-similarity in rock art in the old world and on American Indian pottery. Many writers have also explored these ideas in works of fiction.

Recursionism in philosophy

As philosophy, it is an old idea, which can be seen in the works of many thinkers around the world. It stands for the principle that repetition of structure across space, time, and scale provides the key to understanding reality; it explains how the brain can comprehend the world. The claim is made that we are able to understand reality because of the underlying recursive regularity.

Recursion leads to variety in form when the basic structures through evolution become increasingly complex. Recursionism is the reason why the same models work in a variety of fields, and also across scale. Recursionism is not identical to Structuralism since it encompasses not only the physical but also the temporal and the abstract.

In the East, it is seen most prominently in the Upanishads and other similar writings. Amongst recent philosophers, the works of Aurobindo and Kak have stressed this thought. In the West, we see a recursionist strand in the works of Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

External links

Deconstruction

In Continental philosophy and literary criticism, deconstruction is a school of criticism created by the French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida offered what he called deconstructive readings of Western philosophers. Roughly speaking, a deconstructive reading is an analysis of a text that uncovers the difference between the text's structure and its Western metaphysical essence. Deconstructive readings show how texts cannot simply be read as a single author communicating a distinct message, but instead must be read as sites of conflict within a given culture or worldview. A deconstructed text will reveal a multitude of viewpoints simultaneously existing, often in direct conflict with one another. Comparison of a deconstructive reading of a text with a more traditional one will also show how many of these viewpoints are suppressed and ignored.

The central move of a deconstructive analysis is to look at binary oppositions within a text (for instance, maleness and femaleness, or homosexuality and heterosexuality) and to show how, instead of describing a rigid set of categories, the two opposing terms are actually fluid and impossible to separate fully. The conclusion from this, generally, is that the categories do not actually exist in any rigid or absolute sense.

Deconstruction was highly controversial both in academia, where it was accused of being nihilistic, parasitic, and just plain silly, and in the popular press, where it was often seized upon as a sign that academia had become completely out of touch with reality. Despite this controversy, it remains a major force in contemporary philosophy and literary criticism and theory.

Contents [hide]
1 The philosophical meaning of deconstruction
2 Phallogocentrism and the critique of binary oppositions
3 Text and deconstruction
4 The terminology of deconstruction

4.1 Différance
4.2 Trace
4.3 Écriture

5 An illustration: Derrida's reading of Lévi-Strauss
6 Criticisms of deconstruction

6.1 Lack of usefulness
6.2 Unintelligibility
6.3 Lack of seriousness and transparency
6.4 Political criticisms
6.5 Criticisms classifying deconstruction as nihilism or relativism

7 History of deconstruction

7.1 Precursors

8 Deconstruction in popular media
9 See also
10 External links
11 References

The philosophical meaning of deconstruction

The term deconstruction in the context of Western philosophy is highly resistant to a succinct, formal definition. Jacques Derrida was the first to use the term, and it has been explored by others, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, and J. Hillis Miller. These authors, however, have actively resisted calls to define the word precisely and succinctly. When asked what deconstruction is, Derrida once stated, "I have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question." (Derrida 1985, at 4.) It is not even entirely clear what kind of thing deconstruction is - whether it is a school of thought, a method of reading, or, as some call it, a "textual event."

There are hundreds of pages devoted to the issue of what deconstruction is. Most of these texts are difficult reading, and resistant to summary. Those writing sympathetically about deconstruction tend to use an idiosyncratic style building upon a long tradition of difficult Western philosophy, with the addition of numerous neologisms, and a bent toward playfulness and irony. Some suggest that this style of writing about deconstruction is essential to a proper treatment of the subject. Others find this discourse to be needlessly obscurantist.

It is much easier to explain what deconstruction is not. According to Derrida, deconstruction is neither an analysis, a critique, a method, an act, nor an operation. (Derrida 1985, at 3.) In addition, deconstruction is not, properly speaking, a synonym for "destruction." Rather, according to Barbara Johnson,

[Deconstruction] is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo"—a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself." (Johnson, 1981).

In addition, deconstruction is not the same as nihilism or relativism. It is not the abandonment of meaning, but a demonstration that Western thought has not satisfied its quest for a "transcendental signifier" that will give meaning to all other signs. According to Derrida, "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other" (Derrida 1984, at 124), and an attempt "to discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be [that] 'other' of philosophy" (Id. at 112). Thus, meaning is "out there", but it cannot be located by Western metaphysics, because text gets in the way. Deconstruction emphasises the way that presentism leaves us with no more than a chain of relations.

Part of the difficulty in defining deconstruction arises from the fact that the act of defining deconstruction in the language of Western metaphysics requires one to accept the very ideas of Western metaphysics that are thought to be the subject of deconstruction. Nevertheless, various authors have provided a number of rough definitions. The philosopher David B. Allison (an early translator of Derrida) stated:

"[Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics." (Introduction by Allison, in Derrida, 1973, p. xxxii, n. 1.)

Another rough-but-concise explanation of deconstruction is by Paul de Man, who explained, "It's possible, within text, to frame a question or to undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements." (de Man, in Moynihan 1986, at 156.) Thus, viewed in this way, "the term 'deconstruction', refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message." (Rorty 1995) (The word accidental is usually interpreted here in the sense of incidental).

Phallogocentrism and the critique of binary oppositions

Deconstruction's central concern is a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a "metaphysics of presence" (also known as logocentrism or sometimes phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction.

One typical procedure of deconstruction is its critique of binary oppositions. A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged or "central" over the other. The privileged, central term is the one most associated with the phallus (penis) and the logos. Examples include:

  • speech over writing
  • presence over absence
  • identity over difference
  • fullness over emptiness
  • meaning over meaninglessness
  • mastery over submission
  • life over death

Derrida argues in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) that, in each such case, the first term is classically conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." These binary oppositions, and others of their form, he argues, must be deconstructed.

This deconstruction is effected in stages. First, Derrida suggests, the opposition must be inverted, and the second, traditionally subordinate term must be privileged. He argues that these oppositions cannot be simply transcended; given the thousands of years of philosophical history behind them, it would be disingenuous to attempt to move directly to a domain of thought beyond these distinctions. So deconstruction attempts to compensate for these historical power imbalances, undertaking the difficult project of thinking through the philosophical implications of reversing them.

Only after this task is undertaken (if not completed, which may be impossible), Derrida argues, can philosophy begin to conceive a conceptual terrain outside these oppositions: the next project of deconstruction would be to develop concepts which fall under neither one term of these oppositions nor the other. Much of the philosophical work of deconstruction has been devoted to developing such ideas and their implications, of which différance may be the prototype (as it denotes neither simple identity nor simple difference). Derrida spoke in an interview (first published in French in 1967) about such "concepts," which he called merely "marks" in order to distinguish them from proper philosophical concepts:

...[I]t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics. (Positions, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 42-43)

As can be seen in this discussion of its terms' undecidable, unresolvable complexity, deconstruction requires a high level of comfort with suspended, deferred decision; a deconstructive thinker must be willing to work with terms whose precise meaning has not been, and perhaps cannot be, established. (This is often given as a major reason for the difficult writing style of deconstructive texts.) Critics of deconstruction find this unacceptable as philosophy; many feel that, by working in this manner with unspecified terms, deconstruction ignores the primary task of philosophy, which they say is the creation and elucidation of concepts. This deep criticism is a result of a fundamental difference of opinion about the nature of philosophy, and is unlikely to be resolved simply.

Text and deconstruction

According to deconstructive readers, one of the phallogocentrisms of modernism is the distinction between speech (logos) and writing, with writing historically being thought of as derivative to logos. As part of subverting the presumed dominance of logos over text, Derrida showed that the idea of a speech-writing dichotomy contains within it the idea of a very expansive view of textuality that subsumes both speech and writing. According to Jacques Derrida, "There is nothing outside of the text" (Derrida, 1976, at 158). That is, text is thought of not merely as linear writing derived from speech, but any form of depiction, marking, or storage, including the marking of the human brain by the process of cognition or by the senses.

In a sense, deconstruction is simply a way to read text (as broadly defined); any deconstruction has a text as its object and subject. This accounts for deconstruction's broad cross-disciplinary scope. Deconstruction has been applied to literature, art, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, and any other disciplines that can be thought of as involving the act of marking.

In deconstruction, text can be thought of as "dead", in the sense that once the markings are made, the markings remain in suspended animation and do not change in themselves. Thus, what an author says about her text doesn't revive it, and is just another text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of others. In this view, when an author says, "You have understood my work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the textual system, along with what the reader said was understood in and about the original text, and not a resuscitation of the original dead text. The reader has an opinion, the author has an opinion. Communication is possible not because the text has a transcendental signification, but because the brain tissue of the author contains similar "markings" as the brain tissue of the reader. These brain markings, however, are unstable and fragmentary.

The terminology of deconstruction

Deconstruction makes use of a number of terms, many of which are coined or repurposed, that illustrate or follow the process of deconstruction. Among these words are différance, trace, écriture, supplement, hymen, pharmakon, slippage, marge, entame, and parergon.

Différance

Main Article: différance

Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings a (non)concept called différance. This French neologism is, on the deconstructive argument, properly neither a word nor a concept; it names the non-coincidence of meaning both synchronically (one French homonym means "differing") and diachronically (another French homonym means "deferring"). Because the resonance and conflict between these two French meanings is difficult to convey tersely in English, the word différance is usually left untranslated.

In simple terms, this means that rather than privileging commonality and simplicity and seeking unifying principles (or grand teleological narratives, or overarching concepts, etc.) deconstruction empasizes difference, complexity, and non-self-identity. A deconstructive reading of a text, or a deconstructive interpretation of philosophy (for deconstruction tends to elide any difference between the two), often seeks to demonstrate how a seemingly unitary idea or concept contains different or opposing meanings within itself. The elision of difference in philosophical concepts is even referred to in deconstruction as a kind of violence, the idea being that theory's willful misdescription or simplification of reality always does violence to the true richness and complexity of the world. This criticism can be taken as a rejection of the philosophical law of the excluded middle, arguing that the simple oppositions of Aristotelian logic force a false appearance of simplicity onto a recalcitrant world.

Thus the perception of différance has two sides, both a deferment of final, unifying meaning in a unit of text (of whatever size, word or book), and a difference of meaning of the text upon every act of re-reading a work. Repetition, and the impossibility of final access to a text, of ever being at the text's "ground zero" so to speak, are emphasized, indefinitely leaving a text outside of the realm of the knowable in typical senses of "mastery". A text can, obviously, be experienced, be read, be "understood" -- but that understanding, for all its deep feeling or lack of it, is marked by a quintessential provisionality that never denys the possibility of rereading. Indeed it requires this. If the text is traditionally thought to be some perdurable sequence of symbols (letters) that go through time unchanged in the formal sense, différance moves the concept toward the realization that for all the perdurability of the text, experience of this structure is impossible and inconceivable outside of the realm of the unique instance, outside of the realm of perception.

A text cannot read itself, therein lies the provisionality of différance.

Trace

The idea of différance also brings with it the idea of trace. A trace is what a sign differs/defers from. It is the absent part of the sign's presence. In other words, through the act of différance, a sign leaves behind a trace, which is whatever is left over after everything present has been accounted for. According to Derrida, "the trace itself does not exist" (Derrida 1976, at 167)", because it is self-effacing. That is, "[i]n presenting itself, it becomes effaced" (Id. at 125.)

Écriture

In deconstruction, the word écriture (usually translated as writing in English) is appropriated to refer not just to systems of graphic communication, but to all systems inhabited by différance. A related term, called archi-écriture, refers to the positive side of writing, or writing as an ultimate principle, rather than an a derivative of logos (speech). In other words, whereas the Western logos encompasses writing, it is equally valid to view archi-écriture as encompassing the logos, and therefore speech can be thought of as a form of writing: writing on air waves, or on the memory of the listener or recording device.

An illustration: Derrida's reading of Lévi-Strauss

A more concrete example, drawn from one of Derrida's most famous works, may help to clarify the typical manner in which deconstruction works.

Structuralist analysis generally relies on the search for underlying binary oppositions as an explanatory device. The structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that such oppositions are found in all cultures, not only in Western culture, and thus that the device of binary opposition was fundamental to meaning.

Deconstruction challenges the explanatory value of these oppositions. This method has three steps. The first step is to reveal an asymmetry in the binary opposition, suggesting an implied hierarchy. The second step is to reverse the hierarchy. The third step is to displace one of the terms of the opposition, often in the form of a new and expanded definition.

In his book Of Grammatology, Derrida offers one example of deconstruction applied to a theory of Lévi-Strauss. Following many other Western thinkers, Lévi-Strauss distinguished between "savage" societies lacking writing and "civilized" societies that have writing. This distinction implies that human beings developed verbal communication (speech) before some human cultures developed writing, and that speech is thus conceptually as well as chronologically prior to writing (thus speech would be more authentic, closer to truth and meaning, and more immediate than writing).

Although the development of writing is generally considered to be an advance, after an encounter with the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss suggested that societies without writing were also lacking violence and domination (in other words, savages are truly noble savages). He further argued that the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery (or social inequality, exploitation, and domination in general). (This claim has been rejected by most later historians and anthropologists as strictly incorrect. There is abundant historical evidence that many hunter-gatherer societies and later non-literate tribes had significant amounts of violence and warfare in their cultures.)

Derrida's interpretation begins with taking Lévi-Strauss's discussion of writing at its word: what is important in writing for Lévi-Strauss is not the use of markings on a piece of paper to communicate information, but rather their use in domination and violence. Derrida further observes that, based on Lévi-Strauss's own ethnography, the Nambikwara really do use language for domination and violence. Derrida thus concludes that writing, in fact, is prior to speech. That is, he reverses the opposition between speech and writing.

Derrida was not making fun of Lévi-Strauss, nor did he mean to supersede, replace, or proclaim himself superior to Lévi-Strauss. (A common theme of deconstruction is the desire to be critical without assuming a posture of superiority.) He was using his deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss to question a common belief in Western culture, dating back at least to Plato: that speech is prior to, more authentic than, and closer to "true meaning" than writing.

Criticisms of deconstruction

Deconstruction is the subject of at least three main types of criticism. Critics take issue with what they believe is a lack of seriousness and transparency in deconstructive writings, and with what they interpret as a political stance against traditional modernism. In addition, critics often equate deconstruction with nihilism or relativism and criticize deconstruction accordingly.

Lack of usefulness

Many critics wonder what is the usefulness of deconstruction. They see it as little more than a tricksy way to discredit a text without having to refute any of the text's arguments. They say that it doesn't seem to help scientists or philosophers nor does it seem to have any scientific value. They also point out that no one seems to benefit from deconstruction except the deconstructionists themselves.

Unintelligibility

Deconstructive readings have been criticized both academically and popularly as largely nonsensical and unintelligible. Few would argue that such discourse is nonsensical to those who do not understand it, and that just because something is unintelligible to one doesn't mean it is unintelligible to another reader. But there remains a question as to whether deconstruction is so superficial that, after peeling away the often dense and complicated language, anything remains.

The question of whether deconstruction really "means something" was explored by an experiment conducted by Alan Sokal, a liberal-modernist physicist who published an article in a leading (though not peer-reviewed) journal using some of the language, vocabulary, and rhetorical devices of deconstruction, but which he deliberately designed to be what he considered "self-indulgent nonsense". See Sokal affair. This parody was not truly nonsensical, however, as it had its own internal logic.

A truly nonsensical parody, however, was created later by some artificial intelligence researchers, who wrote a program they called The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern), which produces a superficially realistic article on a postmodern theme, using much of the textual genre of deconstruction. Overall, however, the generated article is incoherent, and not an actual deconstructive reading.

Therefore, the question of critics is whether there is a substantive difference between "real" deconstruction and these parodies, and whether deconstruction is so lacking in "substance" that it could be done by a machine. In other words, is deconstruction a genre with no plot, and is deconstruction its own hoax or parody?

These parodies of deconstruction have been criticized as not being "true" deconstruction. Ironically, though, there are those within the postmodern community who view the Sokal affair and the Postmodern Generator as an affirmation of what they have been asserting all along: that there is no strict binary opposition between a parody and a "serious" academic work, that all academic work is its own parody and all parodies have serious points to make, and that the reader is not confined by the views of the author, even if the author is a machine or the author does not himself agree with his work.

Lack of seriousness and transparency

As part of the tradition of modernism and the Enlightenment, matters of Western philosophy and literary criticism have generally been framed within a particular standard of formality, transparency, earnestness, rationality, and high-mindedness. As a critique of modernism, however, deconstruction is usually rational at least to an extent; but deconstruction is also critical of Western rationality, which to modernist thinkers appears irrational. In addition, deconstruction tends to be comparatively opaque, eccentric, playful, derivative, and often crass. As a result, deconstruction takes place on the margins of modernist discourse, which invites criticism by modernists. There is a particular expectation of seriousness in Western philosophy. Therefore, many critics find it irreverent to deconstruct Western metaphysics using puns, wordplay, poetry, book reviews, fiction, or the analysis of pop culture.

In addition, deconstruction sprang in part as a critique of such philosophers as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. While the style of Husserl and Heidegger was dense and opaque, Derrida's criticism of their writings was for some readers even more difficult to understand. Similarly, most deconstructive writings are relatively opaque and dense, and are full of not only the terminology of the text being critiqued, but additional neologisms that many find hard to follow. This opaqueness in texts of the broader movements of postmodernism and post-structuralism has led to criticism of those movements, and implicitly of deconstruction, by many modernists such as Noam Chomsky, himself a noted linguist, who stated:

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Noam Chomsky on Rationality/Science - From Z Papers Special Issue (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/95-science.html)

Political criticisms

Deconstruction has also been criticized for its perceived political stance, in that it is perceived as advocating particular movements or points of view. An argument can be made that deconstruction is apolitical. Indeed, Jacques Derrida has consistently denied any simple political aspect to deconstruction, and his later texts are concerned with complicating the relationship between deconstruction and politics. However, deconstructive writers are much more closely associated with the political left and various elements of academia than with the political right.

Thus, some critics view deconstruction as means of academic empire-building; they see deconstruction as elevating the practice of reading and deconstructing a text to the same status as the original act of writing the text. For example, critics have taken issue with deconstructive writings which seem to elevate the criticism of Western science, metaphysics, and philosophy, such as quantum mechanics and the writings of Aristotle, to the same political status as the original scientific and philosophical writings. This seems to give deconstructive writings a privileged position with respect to other writings. This, critics suggest, is arrogant.

While there are numerous left-leaning political forces at work within postmodernism as a whole, deconstructive writers such as Derrida argue that deconstruction is not simply political. For example, while deconstruction criticizes the binary opposition between presence and absence, and the tendency to favor presence, deconstruction does not go a step further and advocate absence, or argue that the Western favoritism of presence is simply a bad thing. This further step, deconstructive writers argue, would not be deconstruction at all, but construction or reconstruction. Nor, deconstructive writers argue, does deconstruction necessarily imply an advocacy of one type of text over another. They agree, however, that critics of deconstruction ascribe that stance of advocacy to the deconstructive writer, because (they argue) of the critics' own logocentrism.

Undoubtedly, however, everything that deconstructive writers do is not deconstructive, and deconstructive writers hold political views and take the role of advocating aspects of Western metaphysics. Deconstructive writers do not view this as inconsistent with deconstruction. They do not see a paradox in advocating a point of Western metaphysics with self-conscious irony. Derrida stated, "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other" (Derrida 1984, at 124).

Criticisms classifying deconstruction as nihilism or relativism

Especially in non-academic forums, deconstruction is criticized for the same reasons as nihilism and relativism, which many view as equivalent to deconstruction. For example, critics commonly argue that deconstruction denies that authors have an intention, or that text has any meaning. Therefore, deconstruction is criticized because of the belief that deconstruction is a form of nihilism or extreme relativism.

Deconstructive writers generally disagree that deconstruction is a destruction of all meaning and authorial intentionality. Rather, they say, meaning exists, as does authorial intent; however, Western philosophy has failed to locate or situate that meaning and that intent outside the realm of text. If one tries through metaphysics to find meaning or intent outside text, they say, one only finds a web of text from which one cannot escape using Western metaphysics. However, there is value, according to some deconstructive writers, in following the textual threads of Western metaphysics, which is something like wordplay. And one may hope, they suppose, to transcend Western metaphysics. This is quite different, in their view, from the nihilist assertion that meaning and intent do not exist, and that it is futile to seek them.

Critics have also criticized deconstruction as a form of solipsism, arguing that deconstruction implies that there is no reality "out there", or that one cannot know its true nature. Deconstructive writers do not agree with this assertion. They acknowledge that there is a reality "out there", and that one may discover knowledge or true nature, but state that Western metaphysics has not provided a mechanism whereby these ideals may be located outside the bounds of text.

Nor do deconstructive writers allege that it is impossible to learn authoritative information. However, authoritative text, they say, is still text, and while Western metaphysics has established methods to establish and perpetuate authority, it has not located the source of that authority as a transcendental signifier.

History of deconstruction

During the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers influenced by deconstruction, including Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, worked at Yale University. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism, as de Man, Miller, and Hartman were all primarily literary critics. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the University of California Irvine.

(More detailed institutional history could be added here.)

Precursors

Deconstruction has significant ties with much of Western philosophy; even considering only Derrida's work, there are existing deconstructive texts about the works of at least many dozens of important philosophers. However, deconstruction emerged from a clearly delineated philosophical context:

  • Derrida's earliest work, including the texts that introduced the term "deconstruction," dealt with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Derrida's first publication was a book-length Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomena, an early work, dealt largely with phenomenology.
  • A student and prior interpreter of Husserl's, Martin Heidegger, was one of the most significant influences on Derrida's thought: Derrida's Of Spirit deals directly with Heidegger, but Heidegger's influence on deconstruction is much broader than that one volume.
  • The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud is an important reference for much of deconstruction: The Post Card, important essays in Writing and Difference, Archive Fever, and many other deconstructive works deal primarily with Freud.
  • The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is a forerunner of deconstruction in form and substance, as Derrida writes in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles.
  • The structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, and other forms of post-structuralism that evolved contemporaneously with deconstruction (such as the work of Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, etc.), were the immediate intellectual climate for the formation of deconstruction. In many cases, these authors were close friends, colleagues, or correspondents of Derrida's.

Deconstruction in popular media

In popular media, deconstruction has been seized upon by conservative writers as a central example of what is wrong with modern academia. Editorials and columns come out with some frequency pointing to deconstruction as a sign of how self-evidently absurd English departments have become, and of how traditional values are no longer being taught to students. Conservatives frequently treat deconstruction as being equivalent to Marxism. These criticisms became particularly prevalent when it was discovered that Paul de Man had written pro-Nazi articles during World War II, due to what was seen as the inadequate and offensive response of many deconstructionist thinkers, especially Derrida, to this revelation. Popular criticism of deconstruction also intensified following the Sokal affair, which many people took as an indicator of the quality of deconstructionism as a whole, despite Sokal's insistence that his hoax proved nothing of the sort.

Deconstruction is also used by many popular sources as a synonym for revisionism - for instance, the CBS miniseries The Reagans was described by some as a "deconstruction" of the Reagan administration.

See also

Jacques Derrida -- Paul de Man -- Jean Baudrillard -- Jean-François Lyotard -- Judith Butler -- Yale school (deconstruction) -- structuralism -- Post-structuralism -- recursionism -- Cultural movement -- Post-modernism -- Continental philosophy -- feminism -- feminist theory -- Queer theory -- literary theory -- literary criticism -- psychoanalysis -- phenomenology -- Christopher Norris

Deconstructivism or Deconstruction is an architectural movement inspired by Deconstruction.

External links

References

  • Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. ISBN 0801413222
  • Derrida, Jacques, "Letter to A Japanese Friend," (http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Simulate/Derrida_deconstruction.html) Derrida and Differance, ed. David Wood & Robert Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia Press 1985, p. 1.
  • Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ISBN 0801858305
  • Derrida, Jacques, Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1981. ISBN 0226143317
  • Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1973. ISBN 081010590X
  • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. ISBN 081661251X
  • Ellis, John M. (1989). Against Deconstruction Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06754-6
  • Johnson, Barbara, The Critical Difference (1981).
  • Moynihan, Robert, Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmen, Paul DeMan, J. Hillis Miller (Shoe String Press 1986). ISBN 0208021205.
  • Rorty, Richard, "From Formalism to Poststructuralism", in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol.8, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Structuralism

See also structural analysis and structural functionalism.

Structuralism is an approach that grew to become one of the most widely used methods of analyzing language, culture, and society in the second half of the 20th century. 'Structuralism', however, does not refer to a clearly defined 'school' of authors, although the work of Ferdinand de Saussure is generally considered a starting point. Structuralism is best seen as a general approach with many different variations. As with any cultural movement, the influences and developments are complex.

Broadly, structuralism seeks to explore the inter-relationships (the "structures") through which meaning is produced within a culture. According to structural theory, meaning within a culture is produced and reproduced through various practices, phenomena and activities which serve as systems of signification. A structuralist studies activities as diverse as food preparation and serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture. For example, an early and prominent practitioner of structuralism, anthropologist and ethnographer Claude Levi-Strauss, analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship, and food preparation.

When used to examine literature, a structuralist critic will examine the underlying relation of elements (the 'structure') in, say, a story, rather than focusing on its content. A basic example are the similarities between West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet. Even though the two plays occur in different times and places, a structuralist would argue that they are the same story because they have a similar structure - in both cases, a girl and a boy fall in love (or, as we might say, are +LOVE) despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other, a conflict that is resolved by their death. Consider now the story of two friendly families (+LOVE) that make an arranged marriage between their children despite the fact that they hate each other (-LOVE), and that the children resolve this conflict by committing suicide to escape the marriage. A structuralist would argue this second story is an 'inversion' of the first, because the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. In sum, a structuralist would thus argue that the 'meaning' of a story lies in uncovering this structure rather than, say, discovering the intention of the author who wrote it.

Some feel that a structuralist analysis helps pierce through the confusing veil of life to reveal the hidden, underlying, logically complete structure. Others would argue that structuralism simply reads too much into 'texts' (in the widest sense) and allows clever professors to invent meanings that aren't actually there. There are a variety of positions in between these two extremes, and in fact many of the debates around structuralism focus on trying to clarify issues of just this sort.

Contents [hide]
1 Saussure's Course
2 Structuralism in linguistics
3 Structuralism after the War
4 Reactions to structuralism
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

Saussure's Course

Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) is generally seen as being the origin of structuralism. Although Saussure was, like his contemporaries, interested in historical linguistics, in the Course he developed a more general theory of semiology. This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present ('synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'). He thus focused not on the use of language (parole, or talk) but the underlying system of language (langue) of which any particular utterance was an expression. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a 'signifier' (roughly, the sound of a word) and a 'signified' (the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches to language which focused on the relationship between words and the things in the world they designated. By focusing on the internal constitution of signs rather than focusing on their relationship to objects in the world, Saussure made the anatomy and structure of language something that could be analyzed and studied.

Structuralism in linguistics

Saussure's Course influenced many linguists in the period between WWI and WWII. In America, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Scandanavia. In France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of the Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential.

The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compile a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague School sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the words 'pat' and 'bat' are different because the 'p' and 'b' sounds contrast. The difference between them is that you vocalize while saying a 'b' while you do not when saying a 'p'. Thus in English there is a contrast between voiced and non-voiced consonants. Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope - it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Chinese and Japanese speakers have differentiating between 'r' and 'l' is due to the fact that these two sounds are not contrastive in Chinese. While this approach is now standard in linguistics, it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for a structuralism in a number of different forms.

Structuralism after the War

After WWII, and particularly in the 1960s, Structuralism surged to prominence in France and it was structuralism's initial popularity in this country which led it to spread across the globe.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism such as that practiced by Jean-Paul Sartre was the dominant mood. Structuralism rejected existentialism's notion of radical human freedom and focused instead on the way that human behavior is determined by cultural, social, and psychological structures. The most important initial work on this score was Claude Levi-Strauss's 1949 volume Elementary Structures of Kinship. Levi-Strauss had known Jakobson during their time together in New York during WWII and was influenced by both Jakobson's structuralism as well as the American anthropological tradition. In Elementary Structures he examined kinship systems from a structural point of view and demonstrated how apparently different social organizations were in fact different permutations of a few basic kinship structures. In the late 1950s he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of essays outlining his program for structuralism.

By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied to literature. Jacques Lacan (and, in a different way, Jean Piaget) applied structuralism to the study of psychology, blending Freud and Saussure. Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how structures of epistemology, or epistemes shaped how people imagined knowledge and knowing (though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist movement). Louis Althusser combined Marxism and structuralism to create his own brand of social analysis. Other authors in France and abroad have since extended structural analysis to practically every discipline.

The definition of 'structuralism' also shifted as a result of its popularity. As its popularity as a movement waxed and waned, some authors considered themselves 'structuralists' only to later eschew the label. Additionally, the term has slightly different meanings in French and English. In the US, for instance, Derrida is considered the paradigm of post-structuralism while in France he is labeled a structuralist. Finally, some authors wrote in several different styles. Barthes, for instance, wrote some books which are clearly structuralist and others which are clearly not.

Reactions to structuralism

Today structuralism has been superceded by approaches such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for being ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of individual people to act. As the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s (and particularly the student uprisings of May 1968) began affecting the academy, issues of power and political struggle moved to the center of people's attention. In the 1980s, deconstruction and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language - rather than its crystalline logical structure - became popular. By the end of the century Structuralism was seen as a historically important school of thought, but it was the movements it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, which comanded attention.

See also

References

Francois Dosse. History of Structuralism (two volumes). University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

External links


On Society and Politics

Jurgen Habermas represents the second wave of Critical Theory. He was not a contemporary of the other members of the Frankfurt school However, he is included in the school of thought because his work continues the critique that the others began. Habermas has written more, and added more to Marxist theory that all the other members of the Frankfurt school. In his work Towards Reconstructing Historical Materialism, Habermas laid out his primary differences with Marx.

Habermas’s primary difficulty with society is that in modern society human beings lack freedom. His primary difficulty with Marxism is that it fails to consider the scope of this lack of freedom. According to Habermas, Marx leaves out the human element. Marx assessment of human evolution as just an economic progression is far too narrow for Habermas. Jurgen asserts that it is societies that evolve economically, instead of the species, he goes on to say that Historical Materialism assumes a learning process. For Habermas, this process becomes a dynamic element in the move from one epoch to another. Where Marx supposed the move to be linear (one step at a time in a straight line), and deterministic, (with a known end), Habermas said it was unpredictable.

Habermas almost completely eliminated the notions of revolution and class struggle from the theory. Instead of these, he introduces the concept of crisis. The crisis is that modern society is not meeting individual needs and that institutions in society are manipulating individuals. People interact to respond to this crisis and Habermas calls this interaction Communicative Action. Habermas adapted Horkheimer’s definition of reason as rationality, then, combines it with the relation based activities that results when humans agree. Communicative action, it is the one type of action, that Habermas says uses all human ways of thinking, and language. This combination allows human beings to understand and agree with one another, to make plans for common action. This coming together and agreeing; communicative action, takes the place of revolution as mode of change. According to Habermas the move from Capitalism to Communism, (if it occurs), will occur as a result of reason and communicative action.

Habermas adds the methodology of psychology and linguistics to his critique, and attempts to move the analysis of Marxism to Social Scientific inquiry. As far a solution, Habermas’s approach offers the process of Communicative Action as the solution. He implies that implementing his theory, and analyzing it will address the ills created by modern society. On the whole, Habermas’s contribution to the Frankfurt school is significant to say the least. It will undoubtedly be revisited as the philosophical conversation continues.

WSWS : Readers' forums : The Balkan War

A contribution to the critique of Jürgen Habermas

By Darshana Medis
27 July 1999

Back to screen version

The following contribution by a reader from Sri Lanka comments on the article ”How Jürgen Habermas defends the Balkan war” by Ulrich Rippert http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jun1999/habe-j05.shtml

The WSWS encourages readers to submit serious articles and commentaries on political, historical and cultural questions.

The article challenging the political stance and the social theory of Jürgen Habermas by Ulrich Rippert published in WSWS on June 5, 1999 is a very timely one. Seventy-year-old Habermas is often portrayed as the “foremost social thinker” of our time—or more accurately, at least since 1970. Also regarded as the “most important theorist in the field of social sciences after Max Weber”, Habermas has now revealed his reactionary character in the debate of the Balkan war, refuting all the honorable titles.

The importance of the critique of Habermas is relevant not only to Germany or to the advanced capitalist world but also to the island in which we live, in a corner of South Asia. In recent times, Habermas has occupied a significant place in intellectual and cultural circles in Sri Lanka.

It's not incorrect to regard Habermas as a forerunner of Post-Modernism, or the last (contemporary) representative of Modernism. In spite of the dispute between Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity, the Post-Modernists hold him in high esteem. It's a serious misunderstanding if someone thinks the reason for Habermas' fame is the brilliance of his thought. On the contrary, as comrade Rippert quite rightly put it, the authority of the Habermas' theory lies solely in the indigestible terminology of his writings.

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School began its work by criticizing Marxism—especially the concept of the “deterministic relation between the (social) super-structure and the economic base”. However, the pre-Habermasian Frankfurt philosophers who followed the Critical Theory often placed one foot in Marxism and called themselves “Neo-Marxists”. At their best, their criticism of capitalism was based on Marxism. In this sense, there was a period in which even Habermas considered himself a Marxist. Or at the very least, he was forced to use Marxist theoretical conceptions because of the Frankfurt tradition. But, when studying his works one can see he always remained an anti-Marxist. Even in his appreciable early little work, Legitimation Crisis (1971) which questioned the legitimacy of the values in modern capitalist society, he did not advocate a socialist solution. He objects to both dialectical materialism (in Theory and Practice) and historical materialism (in Communication and the Evolution of Society). His two-volume major work, Theory of Communicative Action (1981) [1], which is tackled by Rippert, concludes with a rejection of Marx's ‘Theory of Value'. Mere negations! But where are the alternatives? It's hard to find a definite coherent ideology in Habermas' dozen or so books.

Even his latest writings seem to be ‘old wine in new casks'. There is nothing positive achieved by him in transferring from ‘Systems Theory' to ‘Communication Theory'. One follower correctly called this conversion, the “Linguistic turn of the Critical Theory”. In reducing the investigation of knowledge into an investigation of communication, he simply quit the epistemology and the methodology. He himself wrote: “The methodological fruits of my efforts consisted chiefly in uncovering the dimension in which the symbolically pre-structured object domain of social science could be approached through interpreting meaning.”[2]

Habermas criticized the various paradigms of modern social science, from Weber's ‘Rationalization Theory' to Alfred Shutz's ‘Phenomenological Ethno-methodology,' but he offers us a petty-bourgeois radical and idealistic theory of the same character. One of the renowned founding members of Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), said none of these approaches in social studies, claiming to be scientific or quantitative, provide a basis for social transformation.

In fact, this type of social theory never proceeds beyond Hegelian dialectics. In Hegel's philosophy, critique is a negative judgment in which the existing forms of beliefs are detected and unmasked. But, according to dialectical materialism or Marxism, Critique is not merely an intellectual negation of the ideological systems of thought, but a practical and revolutionary activity. In his famous Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx placed the proposition of revolution in the very center of social science and political philosophy stating that, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” The so-called Neo-Marxists of Frankfurt who tried to revise some ‘false conceptions' in Marxism, did not stop at deforming it but pushed the burning necessity of revolution to the corner. In other words, they did not step down from the ‘super-structure'.

Of course, the sterility of Critical Theory has unfolded since Adorno's time. Despite his brilliant analysis of contemporary positivism, the Critical Theory, as a whole, took the path of adaptation to present-day reality. After Walter Benjamin, who could be considered the greatest intellectual of the Frankfurt School [3], the contributions of its representatives, if any, to the development of Marxism was very small. However, in dealing with major political issues such as imperialist war, Nazism, Stalinism, colonization, etc. they had still not descended totally into reactionary positions. But, onto which shore was Horkheimer's successor grounded?

In 1960s, when student activists attacked Adorno for not being Marxist enough and for being irretrievably bourgeois, [one of Adorno's students called into the master's open grave, “He practiced an irresistible critique of bourgeois individualism, and yet he was caught within its ruins.” [4] Habermas responded quickly by defending “the right that the untrue bourgeois subjectivity still remains in the process of disappearing in relation to its false negation.” [5] Nevertheless, he rejected the student politics in first person-plural: “We sociologists did not reckon with the possibility that students could play a political role in developed industrial societies.” [6]

Earlier, when Frankfurt scholars were saying the reason for the continuity of capitalism lay mainly in the authority of ruling class in the ideological field, they seriously underestimated the crisis of proletarian leadership. Later, when Horkheimer rejected the leading role of the working class in social transformation, it marked a rapid deterioration of Critical Theory. Today, when Professor Habermas comes forward as an open propagandist of capitalist politics by justifying NATO's Balkan war, it signifies not only the “end of the period to which the Critical Theory of Frankfurt School belongs”, it also reflects the logical conclusion of its historical path.

Finally, we reiterate the short answer given to Habermas' predecessors by Marx and Engels in their work German Ideology: “The driving force of history is not criticism but revolution.”

Notes:
1. For a comprehensive critique of this work, see “Reason or Revolution? Habermas's Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns by Professor Anthony Giddens, in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, Polity Press, UK, 1985.

2. Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. S.W. Nicholsen and J.A. Stark, Polity Press, UK, 1988, Preface (emphasis added.).

3. In fact, Walter Benjamin had been attached to the Frankfurt School only for very short period - five years. After the financial ruin of his parents, he obtained a small income from Horkheimer's institute. However, before his sudden death, he launched an ideological struggle against the anti-Marxist deviations of his colleagues.

4. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Heinemann, London, 1983, p. 103.

5. Ibid. Introduction, p. xv.

6. Jürgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Polity Press, GB, Reprinted, 1989, p. 29.

 

Habermas, Jürgen


Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) has been the most important intellectual in Germany since the early 1960s. A prolific member of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, he has contributed seminally to German public life in fields ranging from sociology to philosophy and political science. From 1949 to 1954 he attended the universities of Göttingen and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation on F. W. J. Schelling. Although his education was rather traditional, in the mid-1950s he became acquainted with central works in the Marxist tradition. His interest in critical theory led him in 1956 to Frankfurt, where he became an assistant to Theodor W. Adorno at the Institute for Social Research. After teaching in Heidelberg and Frankfurt, he became director of the Max Planck Institute for Research into the Living Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World in 1971. In 1983 he returned to Frankfurt as a professor in the Department of Philosophy.
Habermas's interdisciplinary research has touched on matters important to students of literature at several points. Perhaps his most influential work for literary studies in Germany was the book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). The "public sphere" is a realm in which opinions are exchanged between private persons unconstrained (ideally) by external pressures. Theoretically open to all citizens and founded in the family, it is the place where something approaching public opinion is formed. It should be distinguished both from the state, which represents official power, and from the economic structures of civil society as a whole. Its function is actually to mediate between society and state; it is the arena in which the public organizes itself, formulates public opinion, and expresses its desires vis-à-vis the government.
Habermas's discussion makes clear that the public sphere is not a given for every type of society; nor does it possess a fixed status. The Middle Ages had no public sphere in the sense in which Habermas defines it, but rather a sphere of representation of feudal authority. Only in the eighteenth century, with the breakdown of religious hegemony and the rise of the middle class, does a public sphere emerge. The liberal model of the public sphere, in which private individuals and interests regulate public authority and in which property owners speak for humanity, is eventually transformed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a realm in which the activities of reasoning and the formulation of public opinion are superseded by mass consumption and publicity.
Habermas's hypothesis of a "literary public sphere" as an anticipation of the political public sphere found tremendous resonance among literary critics in Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Particularly provocative were the notion of the commodification of art in the eighteenth century and the discussion of the various institutions in which art and criticism occurred (coffeehouses, moral weeklies). Habermas also made important observations on the rise of new genres, pointing out that the publication of correspondence as a literary form and the emergence of the psychological novel are reactions to a restructuring of the relationship between author, text, and reader. Intimacy as a matter for public scrutiny in fictional works depends on and fosters the legitimation of the public utterance of private opinions.
Habermas's debate with the ontological tradition of Hermeneutics, represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer, also has implications for literary theory. Although he agreed with the necessity for historicization, he objected primarily to the political implications contained in Gadamer's affirmation of "authority," "tradition," and "the classical." Habermas criticizes the conservative nature of Gadamer's dialogical stance because of its non- reflexive affirmation of tradition. In order for emancipation to occur, we must possess the ability to reflect upon and to reject pernicious or regressive aspects of our heritage. Connected with this, Habermas believes that Gadamer's hermeneutics excludes precisely the social moment inherent in all linguistic interchange. Although Habermas, unlike Michel Foucault, posits in his later work communication free from domination as a regulative principle, he nonetheless takes Gadamer to task for ignoring the place of power and hegemony in dialogue.
Habermas's work during the 1980s, in particular Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), thrust him into the center of controversy concerning the concepts of modernity and postmodernity. Opposing Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the postmodern condition, Habermas contends that modernity poses for us a task that must still be completed. Habermas's notion of modernity stems from the tradition of German idealism, in particular from G. W. F. Hegel, who posited subjectivity as the key for comprehending the modern world (see also German Theory and Criticism: 1. Sturm und Drang / Weimar Classicism and 2. Romanticism). The constellation between modernity, consciousness, and rationality that crystallized in his philosophy had three distinct fates in post-Hegelian thought. The progressive neo-Hegelians, such as Karl Marx, operating with a more modest notion of reason, continued the project of modernity. The new conservatives, who reduced reason (Vernunft) to understanding (Verstand) and affirmed scientifistic notions of rationality, jettisoned any critical element in the project. The young conservative faction, which draws its inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche and includes most adherents to poststructuralism, abandons reason altogether and falls into nihilism or anarchy. Habermas's contention is therefore that those who feel that they have gone beyond the project of modernity are deceiving themselves. There is no escape from the problems raised by subjectivity and enlightenment, only a continuation, a trivialization, or a pseudoradicalization of the initial premises.
Habermas's own solution to the project of modernity involves a return to a path abandoned early in Hegel's writings. He posits intersubjectivity as a way to avoid the dilemmas inherent in the "philosophy of consciousness." Instead of proceeding from the isolated subject confronting the objective world, Habermas opts for a model that considers human beings in dialogue with each other to be the foundation for emancipatory social thought. By differentiating between instrumental reason, which has unfortunately achieved hegemony in the modern world, and communicative reason, which has the potential to transform societies into genuine democracies, Habermas can retain a critical edge to reflections on modernity while explicating a positive program for change. In his magnum opus, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981, The Theory of Communicative Action), Habermas develops his views on communicative rationality in the endeavor to rethink the original project of critical theory along intersubjective lines. His criticism of postmodernity is thus an outgrowth of a larger philosophical view that affirms the Enlightenment principles of emancipation and progress, while refusing to abandon the critical potential of modernity.

Robert C. Holub

Notes and Bibliography

See also Frankfurt School, German Theory and Criticism: 4. Twentieth Century to 1968 and 5. Contemporary, and Hermeneutics: 2. Twentieth Century.

Karl-Otto Apel et al., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (1971); Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, 1987), Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchen zu einer Kategorie der bùrgerlichen Gesellschaft (1962, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, 1989), Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (2 vols., 1981, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 1983-87).

Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (1985); Raymond Guess, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (1981); David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (1980); Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (1991); David Ingram, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (1987); Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (1978); David M. Rassmussen, Reading Habermas (1990); Tom Rockmore, Habermas on Historical Materialism (1989); Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (1986); John B. Thompson and David Held, eds., Habermas: Critical Debates (1982); Stephen White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice, and Modernity (1988).

Topics Index Cross-references for this Guide entry:

critical theory, Enlightenment


Public sphere

A concept in continental philosophy and critical theory, the public sphere contrasts with the private sphere, and is the part of life in which one is interacting with others and with society at large. Much of the thought about the public sphere relates to the concept of identity and identity politics.

Heidegger claims that Dasein must balance its activities in the public sphere with its private, authentic activities, but believed ultimately that engagement in the public sphere was necessary to truly be Dasein. Hannah Arendt inverted Heidegger's claim, arguing that in fact the only true and authentic self was the self in the public sphere.

Franz Fanon discusses the way in which one's identity in the public sphere and one's identity in the private sphere can become dissonant, leading to what he calls dual consciousness. His examples deal with issues of colonialism, and the way in which a colonized subject is forced to publicly adopt a foreign culture, while privately they maintain their identity as their own culture.

In contemporary thought, informed by the rise of postmodernism, questions about the public sphere have turned to questions about the ways in which hegemonic forces dictate what discourse is and is not allowable in the public sphere, and in turn dictate what can and can't be formulated as a part of one's identity. For example, the concept of heteronormativity is used to describe the way in which those who fall outside of the basic male/female dichotomy of gender or whose sexual preferences are other than heterosexual cannot meaningfully claim their identities, causing a disconnect between their public selves and their private selves. Lauren Berlant has gone so far as to argue that there is in fact no public discourse about sex or sexuality whatsoever, leaving all sexual identity in the realm of the private sphere, where it is, in her view, deadened and powerless.

Important contemporary thinkers about the public sphere include Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Eve Sedgwick.

See also public place.


Lauren Berlant

Lauren Berlant is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She writes on issues of popular culture and on the nature of citizenship. She is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, the title essay of which won the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American Literature.

Sexual identity

This article refers to sexual identity as used by sexologists, rather than to sexual orientation, sexual behaviour, gender identity, gender role or sex

Sexual identity is the sex with which a person identifies, or is identified. The term is used by some recent writers in the general area of sexology.

Scientists such as John Money, Milton Diamond, and Anne Fausto-Sterling have sought to discover and describe the biological processes involved in the formation of sexual identities. A large array of factors have been hypothesized as being determinative, but there is as yet no settled view on these matters.

Causes of sexual identity

The causes of sexual identity are complex. A sexual identity is not the result of something that occurs at one point in time.

It may be that not all factors relevant to the gradual determination of a sexual identity have yet been identified. The weights of the various factors that are now known or suspected have also not been clearly determined. That being said, there are several different groups of factors that need to be understood:

Genetic factors: Chromosomes play a large part in determining the sexual identity of a child. Normally for humans the configurations are XX and XY for female and male respectively, but this is not always the case to determine completely a sexual identity. Also there can be chromosomal abnormalities and there may end up being XYX, XYY (etc.) configurations as well. Some chromosomal abnormalities may have no outward differences at birth, but may have internal repercussions, however some chromosomal abnormalities may affect the genitalia -- these people are known as intersex.

Some people believe that there is a "gay gene." That view may well turn out to be too simplistic. On the other hand, the genotype of an individual may make his or her sensitivities to various sex hormones different from the sensitivities of other people. One's genetic constitution has a great deal to say about how one will react to environmental factors, especially in the womb.

Pre-natal factors: The fetus is nurtured within the mother's womb, and the condition of the mother has an important influence on the health and development of that fetus. If, for instance, a tumor in the mother's body leads to an abnormally high level of testosterone in her blood stream, the testosterone level in the fetus can be raised and that change can significantly influence its development. For instance, an XX fetus can develop into a baby with a strong resemblance to a normally developed XY boy.

Post-natal factors: Some groups maintain that the socialization of an infant begins almost at birth, and that sexual identity problems may trace back to difficulties in ascertaining whether an intersex infant is a male, a female, or actually has both male and female genitalia, and, probably more importantly, whether that infant's brain has developed as would a male's or a female's. It appears that, in general, the later on in life the sex of an infant is reassigned from male to female or vice-versa, the greater the confusion and turmoil that child will suffer. Much criticism has been raised against surgical reassignment until the individual is able to make an autonomous decision because the gender identity of the individual is generally more important to the individual than the technicalities of chromosomal sex, and even genitalia. This is important in considering the case involving John Money's theory about the gender socialization of children, in which he argued that there was a specific timeframe in a child's development where a boy could be brought up as a girl, and vice versa. This theory was applied to a boy named Bruce: his penis was severely damaged due to a botched circumcision, and the decision was made for Bruce to undergo sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) and be brought up as a girl, "Brenda". However the end result was far from successful -- Brenda never acted like a girl, and eventually underwent SRS again to return to a male physiology. Money began to downplay the success of Bruce's case, and argued that this failure was due to the change being done too late, past the aforementioned timeframe (See the Colapinto item in the Bibliography for further details). Money's theories in regard to gender identity plasticity are now no longer regarded as highly due to this concrete experience.

When considering the case of transgender and transsexual individuals and their sexual identity, many specialists now agree that the greatest importance ought to be placed upon aligning internal gender identity with outward sexual physiology. Many non-operative transgender and transsexual people can and are usually happy with living as their chosen gender, and yet do not obtain SRS for a multitude of reasons. The causes of transgender and transsexuality are not well known, but preliminary evidence may have been found in areas of the brain's structure and size, i.e., on issues of sexual identity that go beyond the status of the genitalia.

The understanding that a person has of his or her own sexual identity is perhaps never complete because that person may continue to grow and change psychologically -- and learning involves physical changes in the brain. On the other hand, as learning and experience increase more of the original picture is filled out to show what that person is and can become. If a young person's education has gone against the grain somehow, it may happen that a conflict breaks through to the surface and realignment follows, or that a person discovers things about himself or herself that may earlier have been hidden.

Bibliography

The following list is not complete, but it should get the general reader started.

  • John Colapinto As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl; Harper Collins; ISBN 0-06-019211-9
  • Anne Fausto-Sterling; Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and The Construction of Sexuality; Basic Books; ISBN 0465077137
  • Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach; Patterns of Sexual Behavior; Ace Books, 1951
  • Francis Mark Mondimore; A Natural History of Homosexuality; Johns Hopkins University Press; ISBN 0-8018-5440-7
  • John Money; Gay, Straight, and In-between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation; Oxford University Press, 1988; ISBN 0-19-506331-7

Compare with


Late capitalism

Late capitalism is a term sometimes used to refer to capitalism of the late 20th century. According to the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, late-stage capitalism will be dominated by the machinations - or perhaps better, fluidities - of finance capital.

Late capitalism is also an important component of Fredric Jameson's influential analysis of postmodernism. A section of Jameson's analysis (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm) has been reproduced on the Marxists Internet Archive.

See also periodizations of capitalism

Postmodernism
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Source: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991. Just two sections from Chapter 1 reproduced here.

I

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.

As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the "new expressionism"; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture ... The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?

It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism - as it will be outlined in the following pages - initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc), where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental "duck," as Robert Venturi puts it)' are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older neighbourhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.

Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric,' it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole "degraded" landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply "quote;' as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.

Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalisations which, at much the same time bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptised "'Postindustrial society" (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal except on of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomise the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if an thing, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to t is argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a point that will be argued in Chapter 2, namely, that every position on postmodernism in culture - whether apologia or stigmatisation - is also at orle an e same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.

A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodising hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodisation has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodisation; in any case, the conception of the "genealogy" largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of "stages," and teleological historiography. In the present context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substantive remarks.

One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodising hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.

Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial." It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s. This is surety one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which "weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living," as Marx once said in a different context.

As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features - from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism - no longer scandalise anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalised and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a Store new- wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.

The first point to be made about the conception of periodisation in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism - a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning antisocial function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society.

This point will be further discussed at the conclusion of this book. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to periodisation, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one most often expressed by the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony - a "winner loses" logic which tends to surround any effort to describe a "system," a totalising dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic - the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example - the more Powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby Paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is postmodern in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses - what Raymond Williams has usefully termed "residual" and "emergent" forms of cultural production - must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.

The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose "schizophrenic" structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone - what I will call "intensities" - which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of political art in the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital.

VI

The conception of postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather than a merely stylistic one. I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) style among many others available and one which seeks to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two approaches in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualising the phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about which it is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the other, a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.

Of some positive moral evaluation of postmodernism little needs to be said: the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration of this aesthetic new world (including its social and economic dimension, greeted with equal enthusiasm under the slogan of "postindustrial society") is surely unacceptable, although it may be somewhat less obvious that current fantasies about the salvational nature of high technology, from chips to robots - fantasies entertained not only by both left and right governments in distress but also by many intellectuals - are also essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologies for postmodernism.

But in that case it is only consequent to reject moralising condemnations of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian "high seriousness" of the great modernisms: judgments one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile, for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channelling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regressive re-establishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of "terrorism" on the social level to those of cancer on the personal. Yet if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualise it in terms of moral or moralising judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.

The distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in Hegel's differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moralising from that whole very different realm of collective social values and practices. But it finds its definitive form in Marx's demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change. The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of capita ism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.

Such an effort suggests two immediate questions, with which we will conclude these reflections. Can we in fact identify some "moment of truth" within the more evident "moments of falsehood" of postmodern culture? And, even if we can do so, is there not something ultimately paralysing in the dialectical view of historical development proposed above; does it not tend to demobilise us and to surrender us to passivity and helplessness by systematically obliterating possibilities of action under the impenetrable fog of historical inevitability? It is appropriate to discuss these two (related) issues in terms of current possibilities for some effective contemporary cultural politics and for the construction of a genuine political culture.

To focus the problem in this way is, of course, immediately to raise the more genuine issue of the fate of culture generally, and of the function of culture specifically, as one social level or instance, in the postmodern era. Everything in the previous discussion suggests that what we have been calling postmodernism is inseparable from, and unthinkable without the hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism ' which includes a momentous modification of its social function. Older discussions of the space, function, or sphere of culture (mostly notably Herbert Marcuse's classic essay The Affirmative Character of Culture) have insisted on what a different language would call the "semi-autonomy" of the cultural realm: its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in forms which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to the contestatory indictments of critical satire or Utopian pain.

What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is not precisely this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere which has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in pre-capitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life - from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself - can be said to have become "cultural" in some original and yet untheorised sense. This proposition is, however, substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the "real" into so many pseudo-events.

It also suggests that some of our most cherished and time-honoured radical conceptions about the nature of cultural politics may thereby find themselves outmoded. However distinct those conceptions - which range from slogans of negativity, opposition, and subversion to critique and reflexivity - may have been, they all shared a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed in the equally time-honoured formula of "critical distance." No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last. What the burden of our preceding demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including "critical distance" in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation; meanwhile, it has already been observed how the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonising those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity. The shorthand language of co-optation is for this reason omnipresent on the left, but would now seem to offer a most inadequate theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local counter-culture forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.

What we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily demoralising and depressing original new global space which is the "moment of truth" of postmodernism. What has been called the postmodernist "sublime" is only the moment in which this content has become most explicit, has moved the closest to the surface of consciousness as a coherent new type of space in its own right - even though a certain figural concealment or disguise is still at work here, most notably in the high-tech thematics in which the new spatial content is still dramatised and articulated. Yet the earlier features of the postmodern which were enumerated above can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object.

The argument for a certain authenticity in these otherwise patently ideological productions depends on the prior proposition that what we have been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the national market and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the representation of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language). As paradoxical as the terms may seem, they may thus, following a classic interpretive option, be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or at least of the mimesis of reality), while at the same time they can equally well be analysed as so many attempts to distract and divert us from that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the guise of various formal mystifications.

As for that reality itself, however - the as yet untheorised original space of some new "world system" of multinational or late capitalism, a space whose negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious - the dialectic requires us to hold equally to a positive or "progressive" evaluation of its emergence, as Marx did for the world market as the horizon of national economies, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist global network., For neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to smaller (and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social organisation; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism. Is this not the case with the yet more global and totalising space of the new world system, which demands the intervention and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The disastrous realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalisms (not only in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused much serious recent left reflection, can be adduced in support of this position.

But if all this is so, then at least one possible form of a new radical cultural politics becomes evident, with a final aesthetic proviso that must quickly be noted. Left cultural producers and theorists - particularly those formed by bourgeois cultural traditions issuing from romanticism and valorising spontaneous, instinctive, or unconscious forms of "genius," but also for very obvious historical reasons such as Zhdanovism and the sorry consequences of political and party interventions in the arts have often by reaction allowed themselves to be unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics and most notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art - the pedagogical and the didactic. The teaching function of art was, however, always stressed in classical times (even though it there mainly took the form of moral lessons), while the prodigious and still imperfectly understood work of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally innovative and original way, for the moment of modernism proper, a complex new conception of the relationship between culture and pedagogy. The cultural model I will propose similarly foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture, dimensions stressed in very different ways by both Lukacs and Brecht (for the distinct moments of realism and modernism, respectively).

We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours. Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organising concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.

In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories. Lynch's own work is limited by the deliberate restriction of his topic to the problems of city form as such; yet it becomes extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward onto some of the larger national and global spaces we have touched on here. Nor should it be too hastily assumed that his model - while it clearly raises very central issues of representation as such - is in any way easily vitiated by the conventional poststructural critiques of the "ideology of representation" or mimesis. The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic in that older sense; indeed, the theoretical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of representation on a higher and much more complex level.

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as "the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence." Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole.

Yet Lynch's work also suggests a further line of development insofar as cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch's model does not yet, in fact, really correspond to what will become map-making. Lynch's subjects are rather clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organised around the still subject-centred or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant key features are marked oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features are noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out into the open sea.

Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments - compass, sextant, and theodolite - correspond not merely to new geographic and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.

Finally, with the first globe (1490) and the invention of the Mercator projection at about the same time, yet a third dimension of cartography emerges, which at once involves what we would today call the nature of representational codes, the intrinsic structures of the various media, the intervention, into more naive mimetic conceptions of mapping, of the whole new fundamental question of the languages of representation itself, in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian) dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts. At this point it becomes clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time it also becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still, a dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of map-making).

Transcoding all this now into the very different problematic of the Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to rethink these specialised geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space - in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this way is also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or "empirically") they really do inhabit a "postindustrial society" from which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist - a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis.

The second point is that a return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser's theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser's formulation remobilises an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology that is not without value for us even today. The existential - the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic "point of view" on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted - is in Althusser's formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan reminds us, is never positioned in or actualised by any concrete subject but rather by that structural void called le sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge. What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or "scientific" way. Marxian "science" provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualising the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for example, Mandel's great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it was unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this definition would want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, and, above all, that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all - and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.

But the Lacanian system is threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan's tripartite functions: the Imaginary and the Real, respectively.

Our digression on cartography, however, with its final revelation Of a properly representational dialectic of the codes and capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself.

An aesthetic of cognitive mapping - a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system - will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object - the world space of multinational capital - at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.

Betty Friedan (1963)

The Feminine Mystique

Chapter 5
The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud

Source: The Feminine Mystique, 1963.

IT would be half-wrong to say it started with Sigmund Freud. It did not really start, in America, until the 1940s. And then again, it was less a start than the prevention of an end. The old prejudices - women are animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men - were not so easily dispelled by the crusading feminists, by science and education, and by the democratic spirit after all. They merely reappeared in the forties, in Freudian disguise. The feminine mystique derived its power from Freudian thought; for it was an idea born of Freud, which led women, and those who studied them, to misinterpret their mothers' frustrations, and their fathers' and brothers' and husbands' resentments and inadequacies, and their own emotions and possible choices in life.

The new mystique is much more difficult for the modern woman to question than the old prejudices, partly because the mystique is broadcast by the very agents of education and social science that are supposed to be the chief enemies of prejudice, partly because the very nature of Freudian thought makes it virtually invulnerable to question. How can an educated American woman, who is not herself an analyst, presume to question a Freudian truth ? She knows that Freud's discovery of the unconscious workings of the mind was one of the great breakthroughs in man's pursuit of knowledge. She knows that the science built on that discovery has helped many suffering men and women. She has been taught that only after years of analytic training is one capable of understanding the meaning of Freudian truth. She may even know how the human mind unconsciously resists that truth. How can she presume to tread the sacred ground where only analysts are allowed?

No one can question the basic genius of Freud's discoveries, not the contribution he has made to our culture. Nor do I question the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as it is practised today by Freudian or anti-Freudian. But I do question, from my own experience as a woman, and my reporter's knowledge of other women, the application of the Freudian theory of femininity to women today. I question its use, not in therapy, but as it has filtered into the lives of American women through the popular magazines and the opinions and interpretations of so-called experts. I think much of the Freudian theory about women is obsolescent, an obstacle to truth for women in America today, and a major cause of the pervasive problem that has no name.

There are many paradoxes here. Freud's concept of the superego helped to free man of the tyranny of the 'shoulds', the tyranny of the past, which prevents the child from becoming an adult. Yet Freudian thought helped create a new super-ego that paralyses educated modern American women a new tyranny of the 'shoulds', which chains women to an old image, prohibits choice and growth, and denies them individual identity.

Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on freedom from a repressive morality to achieve sexual fulfilment, was part of the ideology of women's emancipation. The lasting American image of the 'emancipated woman' is the flapper of the twenties: burdensome hair shingled off, knees bared, flaunting her new freedom to live in a studio in Greenwich Village or Chicago's near North Side, and drive a car, and drink, and smoke, and enjoy sexual adventures - or-talk about them. And yet today, for reasons far removed from the life of Freud himself, Freudian thought has become the ideological bulwark of the sexual counter-revolution in America. Without Freud's definition of the sexual nature of woman to give the conventional image of femininity new authority, I do not think several generations of educated, spirited American women would have been so easily diverted from the dawning realisation of who they were and what they could be.

The concept 'penis envy', which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women - that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era- was seized in this country in the 1940s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women. Many who preached the doctrine of endangered femininity reversing the movement of American women towards independence and identity, never knew its Freudian origin. Many who seized on it - not the few psychoanalysts, but the many popularisers, sociologists, educators, ad-agency manipulators, magazine writers, child experts, marriage counsellors, ministers, cocktail-party authorities - could not have known what Freud himself mean by penis envy. One needs only to know what Freud was describing, in those Victorian women, to see the fallacy in literally applying his theory of femininity to women today. And one needs only to know why he described it in that way to understand that much of it is obsolescent contradicted by knowledge that is part of every social scientist's thinking today, but was not yet known in Freud's time.

Freud, it is generally agreed, was a most perceptive and accurate observer of important problems of the human personality. But in describing and interpreting those problems, he was a prisoner of his own culture. As he was creating a new framework for our culture, he could not escape the framework of his own. Even his genius could not give him, then, the knowledge of cultural processes which men who are not geniuses grow up with today.

The physicist's relativity, which in recent years has changed our whole approach to scientific knowledge, is harder, and therefore easier to understand, than the social scientist's relativity. It is not a slogan; but a fundamental statement about truth to say that no social scientist can completely free himself from the prison of his own culture; he can only interpret what he observes in the scientific framework of his own time. This is true even of the great innovators. They cannot help but translate their revolutionary observations into language and rubrics that have been determined by the progress of science up until their time. Even those discoveries that create new rubrics are relative to the vantage point of their creator.

Much of what Freud believed to be biological, instinctual, and changeless has been shown by modern research to be a result of specific cultural causes. Much of what Freud described as characteristic of universal human nature was merely characteristic of certain middle-class European men and women at the end of the nineteenth century.

For instance, Freud's theory of the sexual origin of neurosis stems from the fact that many of the patients he first observed suffered from hysteria - and in those cases, he found sexual repression to be the cause. Orthodox Freudians still profess to believe in the sexual origin of all neurosis, and since they look for unconscious sexual memories in their patients, and translate what they hear into sexual symbols, they still manage to find what they are looking for.

But the fact is, cases of hysteria as observed by Freud are much more rare today. In Freud's time, evidently, cultural hypocrisy forced the repression of sex. (Some social theorists even suspect that the very absence of other concerns, in that dying Austrian empire, caused the sexual preoccupation of Freud's patients.) Certainly the fact that his culture denied sex focused Freud's interest on it. He then developed his theory by describing all the stages of growth as sexual, fitting all the phenomena he observed into sexual rubrics.

His attempt to translate all psychological phenomena into sexual terms, and to see all problems of adult personality as the effect of childhood sexual fixations also stemmed, in part, from his own background in medicine, and from the approach to causation implicit in the scientific thought of his time. He had the same diffidence about dealing with psychological phenomena in their own terms which often plagues scientists of human behaviour. Something that could be described in physiological terms, linked to an organ of anatomy, seemed more comfortable, solid, real, scientific, as he moved into the unexplored country of the unconscious mind. As his biographer, Ernest Jones, put it, he made a 'desperate effort to cling to the safety of cerebral anatomy'. Actually, he had the ability to see and describe psychological phenomena so vividly that whether his concepts were given names borrowed from physiology, philosophy, or literature - penis envy, ego, Oedipus complex - they seemed to have a concrete physical reality. Psychological facts, as Jones said, were 'as real and concrete to him as metals are to a metallurgist'. This ability became a source of great confusion as his concepts were passed down by lesser thinkers.

The whole superstructure of Freudian theory rests on the strict determinism that characterised the scientific thinking of the Victorian era. Determinism has been replaced today by a more complex view of cause and effect, in terms of physical processes and phenomena as well as psychological. In the new view, behavioural scientists do not need to borrow language from physiology to explain psychological events, or give them pseudo-reality. Sexual phenomena are no more nor less real than, for instance, the phenomenon of Shakespeare's writing Hamlet, which cannot exactly be 'explained' by reducing it to sexual terms. Even Freud himself cannot be explained by his own deterministic, physiological blueprint though his biographer traces his genius, his 'divine passion for knowledge', to an insatiable sexual curiosity, before the age of three, as to what went on between his mother and father in the bedroom.

Today biologists, social scientists, and increasing numbers of psychoanalysts see the need or impulse to human growth as a primary human need, as basic as sex. The 'oral' and 'anal' stages which Freud described in terms of sexual development the child gets his sexual pleasure first by mouth, from mother's breast, then from his bowel movements - are now seen as stages of human growth, influenced by cultural circumstances and parental attitudes as well as by sex. When the teeth grow, the mouth can bite as well as suck. Muscle and brain also grow; the child becomes capable of control, mastery, understanding; and his need to grow and learn, at five, twenty-five, or fifty, can be satisfied, denied, repressed, atrophied, evoked, or discouraged by his culture as can his sexual needs. Child specialists today confirm Freud's observation that problems between mother and child in the earliest stages are often played out in terms of eating; later in toilet training. And yet in America in recent years there has been a noticeable decline in children's ' eating problems '. Has the child's instinctual development changed ? Impossible if, by definition, the oral stage is instinctual. Or has the culture removed eating as a focus for early childhood problems - by the American emphasis on permissiveness in child care, or simply by the fact that in our affluent society food has become less a cause for anxiety in mothers ? Because of Freud's own influence on our culture, educated parents are usually careful not to put conflict-producing pressures on toilet training. Such conflicts are more likely to occur today as the child learns to talk or read.

In the 1940s, American social scientists and psychoanalysts had already begun to reinterpret Freudian concepts in the light of their growing cultural awareness. But, curiously, this did not prevent their literal application of Freud's theory of femininity to American women.

The fact is that to Freud, even more than to the magazine editor on Madison Avenue today, women were a strange, inferior, less-than-human species. He saw them as childlike dolls, who existed in terms only of man's love, to love man and serve his needs. It was the same kind of unconscious solipsism that made man for many centuries see the sun only as a bright object that revolved around the earth. Freud grew up with this attitude built in by his culture - not only the culture of Victorian Europe, but that Jewish culture in which men said the daily prayer: 'I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast not created me a woman,' and women prayed in submission: 'I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou has created me according to Thy will.'

Freud's mother was the pretty, docile bride of a man twice her age; his father ruled the family with an autocratic authority traditional in Jewish families during those centuries of persecution when the fathers were seldom able to establish authority in the outside world. His mother adored the young Sigmund, her first son, and thought him mystically destined for greatness; she seemed to exist only to gratify his every wish. His own memories of the sexual jealousy he felt for his father, whose wishes she also gratified, were the basis of his theory of the Oedipus complex. With his wife, as with his mother and sisters, his needs, his desires, his wishes, were the sun around which the household revolved. When the noise of his sisters' practising the piano interrupted his studies, 'the piano disappeared,' Anna Freud recalled years later, 'and with it all opportunities for his sisters to become musicians.'

Freud did not see this attitude as a problem, or cause for any problem, in women. It was woman's nature to be ruled by man and her sickness to envy him. Freud's letters to Martha, his future wife, written during the four years of their engagement (1882-6) have the fond, patronising sound of Torvald in A Doll's House, scolding Nora for her pretences at being human. Freud was beginning to probe the secrets of the human brain in the laboratory at Vienna; Martha was to wait, his 'sweet child', in her mother's custody for four years, until he could come and fetch her. From these letters one can see that to him her identity was defined as child-housewife, even when she was no longer a child and not yet a housewife.

Tables and chairs, beds, mirrors, a clock to remind the happy couple. of the passage of time, an armchair for an hour's pleasant daydreaming, carpets to help the housewife keep the floors clean, linen tied with pretty ribbons in the cupboard and dresses of the latest fashion and hats with artificial flowers, pictures on the wall, glasses for everyday and others for wine and festive occasions plates and dishes . . . and the sewing table and the cosy lamp, and everything must be kept in good order or else the housewife who has divided her heart into little bits, orle for each piece of furniture, will begin to fret. And this object must bear witness to the serious work that holds the household together, and that object, to a feeling for beauty, to dear friends one likes to remember, to cities one has visited, to hours one wants to recall.... Are we to hang our hearts on such little things ? Yes, and without hesitation....

I know, after all, how sweet you are, how you can turn a house into a paradise, how you will share in my interests, how gay yet painstaking you will be. T will let you rule the house as much as you wish, and you will reward me with your sweet love and by rising above all those weaknesses for which women are so often despised. As far as my activities a]low, we shall read together what we want to learn, and I will initiate you into things which could not interest a girl as long as she is unfamiliar with her future companion and his occupation . . .

On 5 July 1885, he scolds her for continuing to visit Elise, a friend who evidently is less than demure in her regard for men:

What is the good of your feeling that you are now so mature that this relationship can't do you any harm ? . . . You are far too soft, and this is something I have got to correct, for what one of us does will also be charged to the other's account. You are my precious little woman and even if you make a mistake, you are none the less so.... But you know all this, my sweet child ...

The Victorian mixture of chivalry and condescension which is found in Freud's scientific theories about women is explicit in a letter he wrote on 5 November 1883 deriding John Stuart Mill's views on ' female emancipation and the woman's question altogether'.

In his whole presentation, it never emerges that women are different beings - we will not say lesser, rather the opposite from men. He finds the suppression of women an analogy to that of Negroes Any girl, even without a suffrage or legal competence, whose hand a man kisses and for whose love he is prepared to dare all, could have set him right. It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as man. If, for instance, I imagined my gentle sweet girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm, uncompetitive activity of my home. It is possible that changes in upbringing may suppress all a woman's tender attributes, needful of protection and yet so victorious, and that she can then earn a livelihood like men. It is also possible that in such an event one would not be justified in mourning the passing away of the most delightful thing the world can offer us - our ideal of womanhood. I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has determined woman's destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women that has been withheld from them. but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife.

Since all of Freud's theories rested, admittedly, on his own penetrating, unending psychoanalysis of himself, and since sexuality was the focus of all his theories, certain paradoxes about his own sexuality seem pertinent. His writings, as many scholars have noted, give much more attention to infantile sexuality than to its mature expression. His chief biographer, Jones, pointed out that he was, even for those times, exceptionally chaste, puritanical, and moralistic. In his own life he was relatively uninterested in sex. There were only the adoring mother of his youth, at sixteen a romance that existed purely in fantasy with a girl named Gisele, and his engagement to Martha at twenty-six. The nine months when they both lived in Vienna were not too happy because she was, evidently, uneasy and afraid of him, but separated by a comfortable distance for four years, there was a grande passion of 900 love letters. After their marriage, the passion seems to have quickly disappeared, though his biographers note that he was too rigid a moralist to seek sexual satisfaction outside of marriage. The only woman on whom, as an adult, he ever focused the violent passions of love and hate of which he was capable w as Martha, during the early years of their engagement. After that, such emotions were focused on men. As Jones, his respectful biographer, said: 'Freud's deviation from the average in this respect, as well as his pronounced mental bisexuality, may well have influenced his theoretical views to some extent."

Less reverent biographers, and even Jones himself, point out that when one considers Freud's theories in terms of his own life, one is reminded of the puritanical old maid who sees sex everywhere. It is interesting to note that his main complaint about his docile Hausfrau was that she was not 'docile' enough - and yet, in interesting ambivalence, that she was not at her ease ' with him, that she was not able to be a ' comrade-in-arms'.

But, as Freud was painfully to discover, she was not at heart docile and she had a firmness of character that did not readily lend itself to being moulded. Her personality was fully developed and well integrated: it would well deserve the psychoanalyst's highest compliment of being 'normal'.

One gets a glimpse of Freud's 'intention, never to be fulfilled, to mould her to his perfect image', when he wrote her that she must 'become quite young, a sweetheart, only a week old, who will quickly lose every trace of tartness '. But he then reproaches himself:

The loved one is not to become a toy doll, but a good comrade who still has a sensible word left when the strict master has come to the end of his wisdom. And I have been trying to smash her frankness so that she should reserve opinion until she is sure of mine.

As Jones pointed out, Freud was pained when she did not meet his chief test - ' complete identification with himself, his opinions, his feelings, and his intentions. She was not really his unless he could perceive his " stamp " on her. ' Freud ' even admitted that it was boring if one could find nothing in the other person to put right'. And he stresses again that Freud's love ' could be set free and displayed only under very favourable conditions.... Martha was probably afraid of her masterful lover and she would commonly take refuge in silence.

So, he eventually wrote her, 'I renounce what I demanded. I do not need a comrade-in-arms, such as I hoped to make you into. I am strong enough to fight alone.... You remain for me a precious sweet, loved one.' Thus evidently ended 'the only time in his life when such emotions [love and hate] centred on a woman'.

The marriage was conventional, but without that passion. As Jones described it:

There can have been few more successful marriages. Martha certainly made an excellent wife and mother. She was an admirable manager - the rare kind of woman who could keep servants indefinitely - but she was never the kind of Hausfrau who put things before people. Her husband's comfort and convenience always ranked first.... It was not to be expected that she should follow the roaming flights of his imagination any more than most of the world could.

She was as devoted to his physical needs as the most doting Jewish mother, organising each meal on a rigid schedule to et the convenience of der Papa. But she never dreamed of sharing his life as an equal. Nor did Freud consider her a fit guardian for their children, especially of their education, in case of his death. He himself recalls a dream in which he forgets to call for her at the theatre. His associations 'imply that forgetting may be permissible in unimportant matters'.

That limitless subservience of woman taken for granted by Freud's culture, the very lack of opportunity for independent action or personal identity, seems often to have generated that uneasiness and inhibition in the wife, and that irritation in the husband, which characterised Freud's marriage. As Jones summed it up, Freud's attitude towards women ' could probably be called rather old-fashioned, and it would be easy to ascribe this to his social environment and the period in which he grew up rather than to any personal factors'.

Whatever his intellectual opinions may have been in the matter, there are many indications in his writing and correspondence of his emotional attitude. It would certainly be going too far to say that he regarded the male sex as the lords of creation, for there was no tinge of arrogance or superiority in his nature, but it might perhaps be fair to describe his view of the female sex as having as their main function to be ministering angels to the needs and comforts of men. His letters and his love choice make it plain that he had only one type of sexual object in his mind, a gentle feminine one....

There is little doubt that Freud found the psychology of women more enigmatic than that of men. He said once to Marie Bonaparte: 'The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, what does a woman want?'

Jones also remarked:

Freud was also interested in another type of woman, of a more intellectual and perhaps masculine cast. Such women several times played a part in his life, accessory to his men friends though of a finer calibre, but they had no erotic attraction for him.

These women included his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, much more intelligent and independent than Martha, and later women analysts or adherents of the psychoanalytic movement: Marie Bonaparte, Joan Riviere, Lou Andreas-Salome. There is no suspicion, however, from either idolators or hostile biographers that he ever sought sexual satisfaction outside his marriage. Thus it would seem that sex was completely divorced from his human passions, which he expressed throughout the productive later years of his long life in his thought and, to a lesser extent, in friendships with men and those women he considered his equals, and thus 'masculine'. He once said: 'I always find it uncanny when I can't understand someone in terms of myself.'

The motive force of woman's personality, in Freud's theory, was her envy of the penis, which causes her to feel as much depreciated in her own eyes 'as in the eyes of the boy, and later perhaps of the man', and leads in normal femininity, to the wish for the penis of her husband, a wish that is never really fulfilled until she possesses a penis through giving birth to a son. In short, she is merely an homme manque, a man with something missing. As the eminent psychoanalyst Clara Thompson put it: 'Freud never became free from the Victorian attitude towards women. He accepted as an inevitable part of the fate of being a woman the limitation of outlook and life of the Victorian era.... The castration complex and penis envy concepts, two of the most basic ideas in his whole thinking, are postulated on the assumption that women are biologically inferior to men.'

What did Freud mean by the concept of penis envy? For even those who realize that Freud could not escape his culture do not question that he reported truly what he observed within it.

In the boy the castration-complex is formed after he has learned from the sight of the female genitals that the sexual organ which he prizes so highly is not a necessary part of every woman's body . . . and thenceforward he comes under the influence of castration-anxiety, which supplies the strongest motive force for his further development. The castration-complex in the girl, as well, is started by the sight of the genital organs of the other sex. She immediately notices the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance. She feels herself at a great disadvantage, and often declares that she would like to have something like that too and falls a victim to penis envy, which leaves ineradicable traces on her development and character-formation, and even in the most favourable instances, is not overcome without a great expenditure of mental energy That the girl recognises the fact that she lacks a penis does not mean that she accepts its absence lightly. On the contrary, she clings for a long rime to the desire to get something like it, and believes in that possibility for an extraordinary number of years and even at a time when her knowledge of reality has long since led her to abandon the fulfilment of this desire as being quite unattainable, analysis proves that it still persists in the unconscious, and retains a considerable charge of energy. The desire after all to obtain the penis for which she so much longs may even contribute to the motives that impel a grown-up woman t3 come to analysis, and what she quite reasonably expects to get from analysis, such as the capacity to pursue an intellectual career, can often be recognised as a sublimated modification of this repressed wish.

'The discovery of her castration is a turning-point in the life of the girl,' Freud went on to say. 'She is wounded in her self-love by the unfavourable comparison with the boy, who is so much better equipped.' Her mother, and all women, are depreciated in her own eyes, as they are depreciated for the same reason in the eyes of man. This either leads to complete sexual inhibition and neurosis, or to a 'masculinity complex' in which she refuses to give up 'phallic' activity (that is, 'activity such as is usually characteristic of the male') or to 'normal femininity', in which the girl's own impulses to activity are repressed, and she turns to her father in her wish for the penis. ' The feminine situation is, however, only established when the wish for the penis is replaced by the wish for a child - the child taking the place of the penis.' When she played with dolls, this 'was not really an expression of her femininity ', since this w as activity, not passivity. The ' strongest feminine wish', the desire for a penis, finds real fulfilment only ' if the child is a little boy, who brings the longed-for penis with him.... The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition she has had to suppress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex.'

But her inherent deficiency, and the resultant penis envy, is so hard to overcome that the woman's super-ego - her conscience, ideals - are never as completely formed as a man's: 'Women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life. ' For the same reason> women's interests in society are weaker than those of men, and 'their capacity for the sublimation of their instincts is less'. Finally, Freud cannot refrain from mentioning ' an impression which one receives over and over again in analytical work ' - that not even psychoanalysis can do much for women, because of the inherent deficiency of femininity.

A man of about thirty seems a youthful, and, in a sense, an incompletely developed individual, of whom we expect that he will be able to make good use of the possibilities of development, which analysis lays open to him. B. t a woman of about the same age, frequently staggers us by her psychological rigidity and unchangeability.... There are no paths open to her for further development; it is as though the whole process had been gone through and remained unaccessible to influence for the future; as though, in fact, the difficult development which leads to femininity had exhausted all the possibilities of the individual . . . even when we are successful in removing the sufferings by solving her neurotic conflict.

What was he really reporting ? If one interprets ' penis envy ' as other Freudian concepts have been reinterpreted, in the light of our new knowledge that what Freud believed to be biological was often a cultural reaction, one sees simply that Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against. If a woman who was denied the freedom, the status, and the pleasures that men enjoyed wished secretly that she could have these things, in the shorthand of the dream, she might wish herself a man and see herself with that one thing which made men unequivocally different - the penis. She would, of course, have to learn to keep her envy, her anger, hidden: to play the child, the doll, the toy, for her destiny depended on charming man. But underneath, it might still fester, sickening her for love. If she secretly despised herself, and envied man for all she was not, she might go through the motions of love, or even feel a slavish adoration, but would she be capable of free and joyous love? You cannot explain away woman's envy of man, or her contempt for herself, as mere refusal to accept her sexual deformity, unless you think that a woman, by nature, is a being inferior to man. Then, of course, her wish to be equal is neurotic.

It is recognised now that Freud never gave proper attention, even in man, to growth of the ego or self: ' the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment'. Analysts who have freed themselves from Freud's bias and joined other behavioural scientists in studying the human need to grow, are beginning to believe that this is the basic human need, and that interference with it, in any dimension, is the source of psychic trouble. The sexual is only one dimension of the human potential. Freud saw women only in terms of their sexual relationship with men. But in all those women in whom he saw sexual problems there must have been very severe problems of blocked growth, growth short of full human identity - an immature, incomplete self. Society as it was then, by explicit denial of education and independence, prevented women from realising their full potential, or from attaining those interests and ideals that might have stimulated their growth. Freud reported these deficiencies, but could only explain them as the toll of 'penis envy '. He saw that women who secretly hungered to be man's equal would not enjoy being his object; and in this, he seemed to be describing a fact. But when he dismissed woman's yearning for equality as 'penis envy', was he not merely stating his own view that women could never really be man's equal, any more than she could wear his penis?

Freud was not concerned with changing society, but in helping man, and woman, adjust to it. Thus he tells of a case of a middle-aged spinster whom he succeeded in freeing from a symptom-complex that prevented her from taking any part in life for fifteen years. Freed of these symptoms she 'plunged into a whirl of activity in order to develop her talents, which were by no means small, and derive a little appreciation, enjoyment, and success from life before it was too late'. But all her attempts ended when she saw that there was no place for her. Since she could no longer relapse into her neurotic symptoms, she began to have accidents; she sprained her ankle, her foot, her hand. When this also was analysed, 'instead of accidents, she contracted on the same occasions slight illnesses, such as catarrh, sore throat, influenzal conditions or rheumatic swellings, until at last, when she made up her mind to resign herself to inactivity, the whole business came to an end).

Today, when women's equal intelligence has been proved by science, when their equal capacity in every sphere except sheer muscular strength has been demonstrated, a theory explicitly based on woman's natural inferiority would seem as ridiculous as it is hypocritical. But that remains the basis of Freud's theory of women, despite the mask of timeless sexual truth which disguises its elaborations today.

Because Freud's followers could only see woman in the image denied by Freud - inferior, childish, helpless, with no possibility of happiness unless she adjusted to being man's passive object - they wanted to help women get rid of their suppressed envy, their neurotic desire to be equal. They wanted to help women find sexual fulfilment as women, by affirming their natural inferiority.

But society, which defined that inferiority, had changed drastically by the time Freud's followers transposed bodily to twentieth century America the causes as well as the cures of the condition Freud called penis envy. In the light of our new knowledge of cultural processes and of human growth, one would assume that women who grew up with the rights and freedom and education that Victorian women were denied would be different from the women Freud tried to cure. One would assume that they would have much less reason to envy man. But Freud was interpreted to American woman in such curiously literal terms that the concept of penis envy acquired a mystical life of its own, as if it existed quite independent of the women in whom it had been observed. The real injustices life held for women a century ago, compared to men, were dismissed as mere rationalisations of penis envy. And the real opportunities life offered to women now, compared to women then, were forbidden in the name of penis envy.

The literal application of Freudian theory can be seen in these passages from Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, by the psychoanalyst Marynia Farnham and the sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg, which was paraphrased ad nauseam in the magazines and in marriage courses, until most of its statements became a part of the conventional, accepted truth of our time. Equating feminism with penis envy, they stated categorically:

Feminism, despite the external validity of its political programme and most (not all) of its social programme, was at its core a deep illness.... The dominant direction of feminine training and development today . . . discourages just those traits necessary to the attainment of sexual pleasure: receptivity and passiveness, a willingness to accept dependence without fear or resentment, with a deep inwardness and readiness for the final goal of sexual life impregnation.

It is not in the capacity of the female organism to attain feelings of well-being by the route of male achievement.... It was the error of the feminists that they attempted to put women on the essentially male road of exploit, off the female road of nurture....

The psychosocial rule that begins to take form, then, is this: the more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe. The greater the disordered sexuality in a given group of women, the fewer children do they have.... Fate has granted them the boon importuned by Lady Macbeth; they have been unsexed, not only in the matter of giving birth, but in their feelings of pleasure.

Thus Freud's popularisers embedded his core of unrecognised traditional prejudice against women ever deeper in pseudo-scientific cement. Freud was well aware of his own tendency to build an enormous body of deductions from a single fact - a fertile and creative method, but a two-edged sword, if the significance of that single fact was misinterpreted. Freud wrote Jung in 1909:

Your surmise that after my departure my errors might be adored as holy relics amused me enormously, but I don't believe it. On the contrary, I think that my followers will hasten to demolish as swiftly as possible everything that is not safe and sound in what I leave behind.

But on the subject of women, Freud's followers not only compounded his errors, but, in their tortuous attempt to fit their observations of real women into his theoretical framework, closed questions that he himself had left open. Thus, for instance, Helene Deutsch, whose definitive two-volume The Psychology of Woman - A Psychoanalytical Interpretation appeared in 1944, is not able to trace all women's troubles to penis envy as such. So she does what even Freud found unwise, and equates 'femininity' with 'passivity', and 'masculinity' with 'activity', not only in the sexual sphere, but in all spheres of life.

While fully recognising that woman's position is subjected to external influence, I venture to say that the fundamental identities 'feminine-passive' and 'masculine-active' assert themselves in all known cultures and races, in various forms and various quantitative proportions.

Very often a woman resists this characteristic given her by nature and in spite of certain advantages she derives from it, displays many modes of behaviour that suggest that she is not entirely content with her own constitution . . . the expression of this dissatisfaction, combined with attempts to remedy it, result in woman's 'masculinity complex.

The 'masculinity complex', as Dr Deutsch refines it, stems directly from the 'female castration complex'. Thus, anatomy is still destiny, woman is still an homme manque. Of course, Dr Deutsch mentions in passing that 'With regard to the girl, however, the environment exerts an inhibiting influence as regards both her aggressions and her activity.' So, penis envy, deficient female anatomy, and society 'all seem to work together to produce femininity'.

'Normal' femininity is achieved, however, only in so far as the woman finally renounces all active goals of her own, all her own 'originality', to identify and fulfil herself through the activities and goals of husband, or son. This process can be sublimated in non-sexual ways - as, for instance, the woman who does the basic research for her male superior's discoveries. The daughter who devotes her life to her father is also making a satisfactory feminine ' sublimation '. Only activity of her own or originality, on a basis of equality, deserves the opprobrium of 'masculinity complex'. This brilliant feminine follower of Freud states categorically that the women who by 1944 in America had achieved eminence by activity of their own in various fields had done so at the expense of their feminine fulfilment. She will mention no names, but they all suffer from the 'masculinity complex'.

How could a girl or woman who was not a psychoanalyst discount such ominous pronouncements, which, in the forties, suddenly began to pour out from all the oracles of sophisticated thought?

It would be ridiculous to suggest that the way Freudian theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated American women was part of a psychoanalytic conspiracy. It was done by well-meaning popularisers and inadvertent distorters; by orthodox converts and bandwagon faddists; by those who suffered and those who cured and those who turned suffering to profit; and, above all, by a congruence of forces and needs peculiar to the American people at that particular time. In fact, the literal acceptance in the American culture of Freud's theory of feminine fulfilment was in tragi-comic contrast to the personal struggle of many American psychoanalysts to reconcile what they saw in their women patients with Freudian theory.

A New York analyst, one of the last trained at Freud's own Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna, told me:

For twenty years now in analysing American women, I have found myself again and again in the position of having to superimpose Freud's theory of femininity on the psychic life of my patients in a way that I was not willing to do. I have come to the conclusion that penis envy simply does not exist. I have seen women who are completely expressive, sexually, vaginally, and vet who are not mature, integrated, fulfilled. I had a woman patient on the couch for nearly two years before I could face her real problem - that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. One day she had a dream that she was teaching a class. I could not dismiss the powerful yearning of this housewife's dream, as penis envy. It was the expression of her own need for mature self-fulfilment. I told her: ' I can't analyse this dream away. You must do something about it.'

This same man teaches the young analysts in his postgraduate clinic at a leading Eastern university: 'If the patient doesn't ht the book, throw away the book, and listen to the patient.'

But many analysts threw the book at their patients and Freudian theories became accepted fact even among women who never lay down on an analyst's couch, hut only knew what they read or heard. To this day, it has not penetrated to the popular culture that the pervasive growing frustration of American women may not be a matter of feminine sexuality. Freud was accepted so quickly and completely at the end of the forties that for over a decade no one even questioned the race of the educated American woman back to the home. When questions finally had to be asked because something was obviously going wrong, they were asked so completely within the Freudian framework that only one answer was possible: education, freedom, rights are wrong for women.

The uncritical acceptance of Freudian doctrine in America was caused, at least in part, by the very relief it provided from uncomfortable questions about objective realities. After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behaviour, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion. It provided a convenient escape from the atom bomb, McCarthy, all the disconcerting problems that might spoil the taste of steaks, and cars and colour television and backyard swimming pools. And if the new psychological religion - which made a virtue of sex, removed all sin from private vice, and cast suspicion on high aspirations of the mind and spirit - had a more devastating personal effect on women than men, nobody planned it that way.

But the practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy was not primarily responsible for the feminine mystique. It was the creation of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation researchers, and behind them the popularisers and translators of Freudian thought in the colleges and universities. Freudian and pseudo-Freudian theories settled everywhere, like fine volcanic ash. Sociology, anthropology, education, even the study of history and literature became permeated and transfigured by Freudian thought. The most zealous missionaries of the feminine mystique were the functionalists, who seized hasty gulps of pre-digested Freud to start their new departments of 'Marriage and Family-Life Education '. The functional courses in marriage taught American college girls how to ' play the role ' of woman - the old role became a new science. Related movements outside the colleges - parent education, child-study groups, prenatal maternity study groups and mental-health education- spread the new psychological super-ego throughout the land, replacing bridge and canasta as an entertainment for educated young wives. And this Freudian super-ego worked for growing numbers of young and impressionable American women as Freud said the super-ego works - to perpetuate the past.

Mankind never lives completely in the present; the ideologies of the super-ego perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and the people, which yield but slowly to the influence of the present and to new developments, and, so long as they work through the super-ego, play an important part in man's life, quite independently of economic conditions.

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, over-protective, life-restricting, future-deriving note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era - were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science - anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now - kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

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Biography | The Second Sex | Kate Millett | Firestone | Franz Fanon | Freud

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